


starboy★

by TittyAlways



Category: D.Gray-man
Genre: Angst and Fluff and Smut, Developing Relationship, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Humour, It's not all bad, M/M, Mental Breakdown, Recreational Drug Use, catharsis is the whole point of tragedy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-07
Updated: 2017-12-29
Packaged: 2019-02-11 15:57:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 33,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12938682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TittyAlways/pseuds/TittyAlways
Summary: look what you've done





	1. waiting for godot

**Author's Note:**

> You know that feeling where your entire world is crumbling and falling apart and you’re kinda watching and not doing anything to stop it, even though you’re the one tearing it down? Self-aware self-destruction. Yeah, that’s the one.

****Quite simply, it was one of those days. Where it was hard to get out of bed and hard to put on clothes and hard for Allen to drag himself out the door. Less because he didn’t want to go to class, more because he didn’t want to be awake. Not to mention that with all the dragging of feet and standing in the shower for half an hour while he slowly woke up, he had to dash off without time for breakfast.

It wasn’t a good morning.

Plus the momentary panic when he thought his card was going to get denied at the campus cafeteria because it was the end of the month and it was _hard_ to sustain a diet like his off a government study pension. And the way he just had that vague fear that he’d walked into the wrong classroom for the first ten minutes of the lecture? Yeah, that wasn’t helping.

But it was fine. It was good, it was fine.

Well it wasn’t _fine_ because it turned out it _was_ actually the wrong lecture and he had to quietly pack up all his books and leave without making a scene. Which he managed to do, but. He could still feel the eyes of his not-classmates watching his back, and it made his skin crawl a little.

It was only once he was out of the room and breathing easily that Allen saw the handwritten sign scrawled on the door reading that his first class for the semester had been cancelled. Because it was a bad day, and the world wanted to persistently reiterate that to him.

Since it was also his _only_ class for the day, Allen found all he could do was stare blankly at the hasty note and the small smiley face drawn at the end before turning on his heel and heading back to the bus stop at the front of the campus.

Luck shone tentatively when he found he only had to wait twenty minutes for the bus - ‘only’ being an optimistic outlook, considering the buses came every half hour. But it was fine. It was one hundred percent okay. It was an incredible inconvenience and a whole magnitude of fruitless labour, but it was _fine._

The bus was full.

There were no perks to an eight o’clock class, and there were somehow even fewer when that class was cancelled. The main anti-perk being that, generally, the eight-thirty bus was packed with school-age students. Allen managed to find a place for himself wedged between the larger-than-necessary bag strapped to a primary schooler’s back and the sweaty armpit of a sixteen-year-old boy twice his size.

Every nauseating motion of the bus only served to shunt him one way or another - getting winded by a bag the size of the child it was attached to, or getting winded by the cloying stench of unwashed teenager. It was hard to breathe and he was feeling a bit lightheaded towards the end of the trip.

It wasn’t even as though he got the satisfaction of watching all those kids disembark so he could steal one of their seats and relax in the unscented air conditioning for a couple stops because, well. He ended up getting off before them.

Which was almost better, but he’d been really looking forward to sitting there and staring at nothing for a few minutes.

But hey, at least he didn’t step in any potholes or get hit by a car on his way back to the almost-sketchy apartment he was renting with Lavi. Although, the number pad of the security code did try its best to be difficult for the sake of being difficult.

And yet, despite all that, Allen made it into the building and onto the elevator without too much of a problem. It didn’t even make the disconcerting deathrattle when it ground to a halt at the third floor, which was almost comforting.

And! He had his keys! So he didn’t have to call Lavi pathetically from outside their front door and beg to be let into his own home.

Which Lavi certainly hadn’t been expecting, if his bandana-and-boxers getup was anything to go by, or the bowl of dry cereal in his hands, or the other bowl of weed by his elbow. Like… at least he was out on the balcony with it.

But that fucking day was so beyond real that Allen didn’t even bother to question it too heavily.

He had been living with Lavi for a year and he didn’t know how he hadn’t known that Lavi smoked weed.

When it came down to it, the revelation wasn’t very shocking.

After taking half a moment to actually look, it was more than just that Lavi ‘smoked weed’ - Lavi was a _stoner._ And Allen just… hadn’t known.

Thinking about it, Lavi did kind of scream stoner. Allen must have simply been around him for too long, he supposed. He’d known Lavi before he smoked, and Lavi had chosen to not make it a part of their friendship. Considerate of him, honestly. Hadn’t really _hidden_ it, if his casual reaction to Allen coming home three hours early to find him on the balcony with a pipe and a bowl was anything to go by.

“Yo, Allen,” was all he said, reclining in his armchair with his feet on the railing. “Want a cone?” And that was that.

Allen realised Lavi assumed he’d known to some extent and had probably just kept it on the down low out of respect for him. After half a moment he decided it would be far too much of a bother to react _now._ Didn’t even really care enough to try, in all honesty.

So instead he said, “Sure,” with a shrug, dropped his bag by the sliding door and stepped onto the balcony. “Class got cancelled anyway,” he reasoned, fell into the matching armchair by Lavi’s and considered that he really would get the chance to stare at nothing for a while after all.

“Lucky for you,” Lavi grinned while he ashed the pipe into the potted plant beside him and packed it with green before passing it to Allen.

“Unlucky for my education,” Allen countered and accepted the small red-painted copper pipe. “How…?” he asked vaguely, gesturing to it.

Lavi struggled to pull a lighter from between the cushions of his armchair with a grunt, held it out for him to take. “Like breathing?” he shrugged and snickered a quick laugh. “Uh,” he gestured eloquently and rested his hands behind his head. “Never had to explain the finer points of smoking before,” he reasoned apologetically.

Allen arched a brow and looked down at the simple metal pipe skeptically. “I’m sure I’ll figure it out,” he reassured his housefriend and struck the lighter, lowered it to the bowl and brought the mouthpiece to his lips.

A small frown pinching his brows, he was acutely aware of Lavi watching him with no small amount of interest while he dragged lightly to try pull the ember throughout the cone. It was strangling and the heavy taste of dope sat uncomfortably on the back of his tongue, making his expression twist a little in distaste.

Calling enough, Allen pulled the pipe away and held it back out to Lavi who made a sharp, confusing gesture which only made sense to Allen as ‘inhale, dumbass’ half a second later - when he was coughing up the lungful of hot smoke which he’d let sit in his throat.

 _“Oh-”_ he wheezed, recoiling from the sharp, choking burn it had left. “Oh _god,”_ he tried again and ended up coughing when his lungs rioted against the abuse.

Lavi looked like he was caught between sympathising and trying to stop himself from cackling at the hilarity and made no move to help Allen either way. _“Dude,”_ he choked on a laugh, hysterics winning out. “How did I _know_ that was going to happen?” He threw his head back and laughed at Allen’s bitterly offended expression, hand pressed to his stomach as though _he_ were the one suffering the hellfire.

“Because you didn’t _tell_ me?” Allen croaked out, hoarse and salty while he pushed himself out of the sofa chair, hunched over with a hand pressed against his mouth to stifle the coughing fits trying to shake him apart.

“I _tried,”_ Lavi wheezed, heaved in a breath and honest to god _snorted._ “Your _face -_ I swear it gets better, trust me,” he patted weakly at Allen’s arm as he stumbled past, heading back inside to get a damn glass of water. “Your - oh god I’m not even sorry,” he kept laughing and Allen was finding it difficult to maintain his staunchly offended expression.

“You should be a little sorry,” he croaked from the sink, still hoarse and burning. But like. He could _breathe_ at least. That was an improvement.

“We’ve all been there man,” Lavi reassured through the open door, still laughing like an asshole. _“Oh,”_ he sighed in blissful relief when he finally managed to pull in a full breath of air after all that hard work he put into cackling at Allen’s pain. “Like,” he giggled a little, shook his head and offered, “at least you didn't throw up?”

Allen shut off the tap and took a large gulp of water, dismayed to find it hardly helped. Considering the burn was in his windpipe rather than his throatpipe that made sense, but. _Some_ kind of relief, _please._ “You gave me cancer,” he groaned pitifully, taking his glass of not-at-all-helpful water with him back to the balcony. “You could have had mercy but instead you gave me cancer.”

“I honestly think I have, like,” Lavi snickered, “scar tissue on the back of my throat.”

“It’s not like this every time,” Allen coughed out, still suffering, “right?”

“Fuck no,” Lavi snorted, put the pipe to his lips and finished Allen’s cone. “Just gotta get good, scrub,” he grinned easily, blowing the rest of the smoke away.

They talked easily from there, bantered the same as they always had. Allen drank his water and complained about throat cancer and Lavi called him a pussy and told him to suck it up.

Their conversation turned, of course, to food and the prospect of the banana bread Link had baked them (which they’d forgotten at Lenalee’s house and otherwise would have dived on). It was gone now, surely. Food laws stated that if cake was left behind it was forsaken, but Allen still stood by that every crumb was as important as the last.

It was only when he found himself saying, “No, Lavi, forks are the _perfect utensil._ You can eat the bulk of the cake however you want, but forks are the perfect shape and height for a dexterous person to flick the crumbs in a calculated movement so they land specifically on the flat part above the prongs,” that he realised just _how fucking stoned_ he was, and couldn’t help the way that realisation made him burst into a giggling fit and double over to try contain his laughter.

Lavi mindlessly returned his hysterics, tried to counter, “But a butter knife has more surface area for crumb scooping, so you-” He paused to suck in a wheezing breath, trying to speak through the giggles, “so you can get more bang for your buck.”

Feigning a severe scowl, the effect somewhat lost by the way he was still hiccoughing with laughter, Allen retorted, “Have you ever tried to deepthroat a butter knife, Lavi?” and only managed to elicit another round of unstoppable cackling from the both of them.

And the worst thing about that, perhaps, was that Allen had _fun._ Because that meant he didn’t hesitate when Lavi offered again a couple weeks later when he came home from class wet and shivering from the sudden outburst of late summer rain.

The weather was still swinging between a light drizzle and irrationally heavy downpour when Allen made it through the door, but the second Lavi saw him walk in he ditched his cereal (which he’d been pouring milk into, for once) and dashed to the bathroom to get the biggest fluffiest towel he could find.

It turned out to not be a towel at all, but rather the marshmallow dressing gown that Lenalee’s brother had given her, which she’d begged them to take (and which Lavi had done readily and without reservation).

He threw it over Allen’s head and Allen wearily, painstakingly peeled off his sopping clothes right there in the entryway until he was down to almost-dry boxers. At long last he pulled that soft, horrendous-looking marshmallow around himself with a whimper of long-overdue relief.

While he’d been busy with that Lavi had been a flurry of activity, finding all the pillows and blankets in the house and throwing them on the lounge room floor with haphazard intent. Allen left him to his whirlwind, wandered into the bathroom with his wet clothes so he could strip off his boxers and also find a real towel so he could do something about his hair dripping icy drops down his spine.

The marshmallow was defeated when the water managed to get _under_ it, and he’d just decided he was a fan, despite having vocally objected to Lavi’s insistence that they take it from Lenalee - and his subsequent refusal to throw it out.

Allen could hear more scrambling around outside while he tiredly attempted to dry his hair, gave up after ten-ish seconds and left the bathroom with the marshmallow wrapped around him and a towel covering his head like a shawl.

When he exited the bathroom, however, he was almost tempted to turn back around and make sure he’d gone through the right door and not like. A gate to an slightly skewed and infinitely more comfortable version of their shitty apartment.

The curtains were drawn over the sliding glass doors and all the lights were off. Lavi, the pyro, had lit candles on the coffee table and kitchen bench to make it feel warm despite their lack of heating, while the rain stepped up to another downpour outside. Lavi was poking a stick of incense into one of the flames in the kitchen, trying to light it, and when Allen craned his neck to see over the back of the couch and into the lounge room he noticed first the carpet of pillows, cushions and blankets - including the ones from Allen’s bed, he noticed with a wry grin - and saw second the gatorade bottle and bowl of chop on the coffee table.

The warm smell of incense gently filled the apartment and when Allen glanced over he saw Lavi had poked the stick into one of the candles and was carrying the spoils of a raided cupboard towards the pillow-carpeted lounge room.

Offhand, he only acknowledged his magic transformation of their apartment with a shrug while he commented, “I was stockpiling some snacks for the weekend, but you definitely need this sooner rather than later.”

Allen, still kind of mindblown, trailed after Lavi into the lounge. His feet sank into the pillows and it was like heaven to lower himself to his knees and lay himself out across it all. “Lavi…” he said quietly, cheek pressed into a cushion and eyes on one of the steady candle flames. He could feel pressure building up behind his eyes and his throat was getting sore and if he hadn’t known better he’d think maybe getting caught out in that rain had made him sick. Sucking in a shuddering breath, he started to say, “Lavi-”

“Nope,” his housefriend overrode him, popping the ‘p’. “Lavi’s not home. You’re not allowed to tell him lies.”

Heedless, Allen rolled and pressed his burning face into the pillows beneath him and grumbled, not sure if he wanted to scream or cry, “I don’t _deserve_ th-”

 _“Nooooo!”_ Lavi exclaimed and forced a winded sound out of Allen when he hit him as hard as he could over the back with a feather pillow. Allen rolled over, feeling Lavi wind back for a second hit, and only ended up catching it in the stomach while Lavi yelled, “You’re _perfect,_ you’re _worth it,_ you _deserve it!”_

Gasping and laughing, Allen wheezed out, _“Cause girl you earned it,”_ and thought it was definitely worth choking on his words when Lavi hit him in the face with the pillow.

* * *

 

Once Allen finished his midterms, passing all his classes with honestly pretty reasonable grades, Lavi decided it called for a celebration. Said celebration honestly had very little preemptive planning involved, considering the idea was only introduced when Allen fell through the door and collapsed onto the couch with a throaty groan which slowly turned into a scream, muffled by the sofa cushions.

Lavi arched his brow, looking on from where he sat a few inches away cradling a cup of probably-coffee-maybe-hot-chocolate in both his hands. He let Allen yell himself out and, once he ran out of air, asked, “You good?” Less concerned so much as ambivalently surprised.

“I’m _dead,”_ Allen corrected, getting a mouthful of couch cushion, and turned his face so he could breathe.

Lavi seemed to contemplate that for a moment and took a sip of his steaming beverage. “Good dead or bad dead?” he asked at length, and Allen rolled himself off the couch so he could flop down to sit properly.

“Both?” he hazarded, dropping his head to fall against the backrest. “I’m just. _Dead._ Midterms. It’s fucked. I’m fucked. Like,” he heaved a gusty sigh, “I’m _done_ and I’m _fine,_ but I am just…”

“Fucked?” Lavi guessed and Allen rolled his head to see him watching Allen expectantly, lifting the mug back to his lips.

“Basically,” he admitted wearily and rolled his head back to its original position, letting his eyes fall closed.

Lavi was quiet for a long moment before announcing, “We should celebrate your temporary freedom from the shackles of standardised testing.”

“And _how,”_ Allen started to ask and realised he knew the answer halfway through forming the question but decided to finish it anyway for the sake of exasperation, “are we going to do that?”

He lifted his head and Lavi lowered his mug, and they glanced at each other for a long moment, both incredibly aware of what was coming next. At long last, Lavi spoke up. “So do we smoke a cone and then go buy snacks, or do we go buy snacks and then smoke a cone?”

Allen opened his mouth and hesitated, more stymied with the choices than he’d thought he would be. Slowly he asked, “Will... we… be physically _able_ to buy snacks if we smoke a cone first?”

Lavi seemed to consider that for a long moment, cocking his head and twisting his mouth aside as he hummed. “I mean,” he allowed after a long moment, “we won’t know if we don’t try, right?”

Allen arched a brow. “Right,” he agreed, not agreeing at all. He could definitely see where this was going to leave them.

As it was, it took them almost half an hour from the first cone punched to actually get to the corner store down the road from their apartment. Allen wasn’t entirely sure _why_ it took that long, but it probably had something to do with Lavi deciding to try find clothes _after_ smoking his, which kind of led to an impromptu game of dressup and resulted in Lavi wearing beige chino shorts and mismatched knee high socks, a white button-up shirt and a chic red scarf. And shades. The fucker had _aviators._ So insufferably _white_ that Allen felt as though he really was about to go blind.

When they actually _got_ to the store, oh boy. Allen was wishing he’d taken the sunglasses, honestly. He kept blinking and rubbing at his eyes, certain they were dry as anything. Spent a solid three minutes looking over the packets of of sweets and trying to decipher the actual, like. Value of money written on the price tags.

Lavi came around from the other side of the shelf with two packets of chips in his hands. “Who?” was all he said, holding them up.

Allen glanced over and blinked owlishly at him, then between the two bags. Thinking heavily on it, he lifted a finger and began to point towards the sour cream and chives, but upon realising how terrible of an idea that was he swung his finger at the last moment to jab at the salt and vinegar. “Her,” Allen announced eloquently, and Lavi nodded as though he’d said something very wise indeed.

“She,” Lavi agreed with a sagely nod and went back around the shelf to return the light blue packet from whence it came.

Allen turned his slow attention back to the candy. At length he said, “Skittles,” to no one in particular and crouched down to pick a packet from the hook. He glanced up as he stood, making hazy eye contact with Lavi at the end of the shelf.

He held the packet up. Lavi looked horrified.

In a harsh, loud whisper he scolded, _“Allen! You can’t just eat the gays!”_

Allen glanced down at the red bag in his hand and read the iconic byline. Hardly trying to hold it back, he sputtered a laugh and ducked his head to snort. With that movement his laugh turned into a gasp of wonder, eyes going wide when they fell on the holy grail. _“Lavi,”_ he breathed and pulled the paper packet from the shelf, looking at it with something like adoration before holding it up for Lavi to see. _“Raspberry licorice.”_

Lavi’s expression sank into a catlike grin and he gave a slow appreciative nod. “You’re damn fuckin’ right, raspberry licorice,” he agreed and Allen clutched his two finds to his chest while he took a few steps to stand beside Lavi and glance around the store with him, eyes distantly scanning the shelves for whatever else they might need in terms of supplies for their two-man party.

Lavi lifted a finger and twisted on his heel like he was sourcing water and pointed behind them at the drinks fridge. “Cola,” he said and Allen made a sound of thorough agreement.

Then they actually had to face the cashier, who had watched the whole thing with skeptical understanding.

Yes, hello fellow person. We would like to exchange these paper strips for your goods. Thank you and have a wonderful day.

As they were heading for the door, each carrying a bag, Lavi remarked, “Money is so fucking weird,” and Allen had to cackle another ugly laugh because he’d just been thinking the exact same thing.

The walk home felt weirdly like astral projecting - or as though everything was sped up while Allen’s mind was working at the same pace as always.

His legs weren’t going faster than usual, were they? They _felt_ like they were going faster than usual. Every ten meters or so he’d blink like he’d just awoken in an alternate version of their multiverse that he _kind of_ felt like he belonged in, but it also kind of felt like he’d just died in a different reality and his consciousness had be transposed into that one.

Weird.

He was definitely surprised when they arrived at the apartment building. Somehow, despite how quickly it had all been happening, the pavement had felt almost like a mobius strip. They would forever walk that path, groceries in hand, and never reach their destination.

While Lavi keyed in the access code, Allen asked without any kind of indication of premise, “Do you ever feel like you’re living a shitty rendition of _Waiting for Godot?”_

Lavi blinked at him and pushed the door open. “Of what?” he asked, confused.

Allen tilted his head while he thought about that. What, indeed. “It’s a play, I think,” he said. “Of two homeless guys just. Sitting around, waiting for someone called Godot. Talking about stuff.”

Lavi only seemed more confused. “What’s it about though?” he pressed, walking through the foyer to the rickety elevator.

Allen opened his mouth before realising he didn’t have an answer. “Nothing, really,” he said after a short moment. After another beat he reasoned, “I guess that’s the point.”

Lavi considered that for a long stretch of seconds until the elevator creaked open in front of them. “That’s. Pretty profound, actually.” They walked in and he pressed their floor number, and the two of them turned to face the door. “Where’s Godot?”

Allen shrugged, watching their dull, distorted reflection in the dented stainless steel of the doors. “Dunno,” he admitted, “he never turns up.”

The contemplative silence stretched between them for a long moment before the elevator rattled and creaked to a halt, the doors sliding open. “D’you reckon it’s a metaphor?” Lavi asked at length while they stepped out and walked shoulder-to-shoulder along the corridor.

“I mean,” Allen reasoned, “it’d be dumb if it wasn’t.”

There was a homeless man sitting outside their door.

Well, like. Not _their_ door, but. He was propped against the short stretch of wall between their door and their neighbor’s, with his head leaned back and his legs stretched out across the hallway. Allen and Lavi glanced at one another, then back at the hobo-looking guy with his thick glasses and messy hair, few-days-old stubble and scruffy clothes.

He turned his head and looked back at them.

In a moment his dead bored expression sprang alive into a grin that might have been charming, if only it weren’t being worn by some sketchy stranger sitting next to their front door. “Evening,” he greeted amiably, voice deep and confusingly cultured. “Are you from three-one?” he asked, jerking a thumb at their door.

Allen and Lavi glanced at each other again, both with matching expressions of vague incredulity. “Uh,” Lavi uttered, “yeah?”

“So,” the man propositioned but didn’t seem hopeful enough to actually push himself to his feet despite his happily friendly expression, “my cousins locked me out.”

Allen arched a brow and asked, “Why?” almost scathingly before he could remind himself that engaging was probably the last thing he wanted to do.

His smile quirked into an amused grin and he countered, “Because they’re assholes,” in a similar tone and arched his own brow behind the thick glasses.

Allen’s eyes narrowed. Had he imagined the bite in that? The sharp sarcasm? Interesting, coming from a guy who looked as though he was moments away from asking their help. Help that, granted, everyone in this hallway knew he wasn’t going to get. But... Yeah. Interesting.

In a blink the sharp edges of the man’s smile had mellowed back to something generally amicable and Allen was almost too occupied with trying to decide if it had really been there or if he was getting paranoid about nothing to hear what he actually wanted.

“Okay,” he laughed ruefully and Allen decided no, he _wasn’t_ too occupied to hear this, “I know how this sounds, but. If I could climb over your balcony it would make my life a _lot_ easier.”

 _“Pfft,”_ Lavi puffed out a disbelieving laugh and commented while he unlocked their door, “yeah, I’m sure it would.”

“Uhm,” Allen ducked his head on a biting laugh, “no offence, but. You can see why we’d say no, right?”

The man cracked a wry grin at that and shrugged helplessly. “Yeah,” he allowed with another rueful laugh, “that’s probably the smart answer.” Letting his head fall back against the wall, slumping back into resignation to waiting while that smile still teased the corners of his mouth, the man lifted his hand in a half hearted farewell and bade, “Have a good evening, boys.”

Lavi glanced over his shoulder at Allen, eyebrows lifted above the frame of his ridiculous sunglasses while he unlocked the door.

Allen pressed his lips together, scuffed his heel against the carpet and cast the homeless man one last not-really-apologetic-but-still-amused smile when he stepped past into the apartment.

As soon as they were inside, Lavi was doubled up with barely-stifled laughter, bags dropped on the floor. _“Have a good evening,”_ he wheezed, looking up at Allen with his eyes tearing-up.

“Boys,” Allen added, blinking distantly and shaking his head as though he couldn’t understand.

He couldn’t, in honesty.

“Oh my _god,”_ Lavi sounded like he couldn’t decide if he was meant to be laughing or sobbing. “He was gonna steal their shit right, like...?”

Muffled, from outside the door right behind them, the homeless man’s smooth voice called, “Not that it’s important, but I _can_ still hear you,” but he sounded too amused by it to be anything like _offended._

Allen and Lavi caught their breath for a moment, locked eyes. Glanced over their shoulders at the door for a moment before the both of them broke back down into hysterical cackles.

In a moment, Lavi caught his breath in a sharp, dramatic gasp, snapping up ramrod-straight. _“Wait,”_ he hissed, fingers clenched in Allen’s arm, “wait, wait. He’s.” He looked at Allen, eyes wide behind his ridiculous sunglasses. “He’s a homeless guy.”

Allen blinked, and then caught on. “Wouldn’t there be two of him?” he reasoned.

Lavi was already going back to the door.

Sliding the deadbolt home, he opened the door against the chain and peered out of the wedged crack at the homeless man. “Hey,” he called, and there was a vague sound of question from outside the door. “Are you waiting for anybody?”

A beat of silence. “What do you mean?”

“Not a man called Godot?” Lavi tried.

The man laughed, and Allen was surprised at the rich cadence of it, his unapologetic amusement. “Wouldn’t I be waiting with a friend, if that were the case?” he reasoned, and Lavi whipped his head around to pin Allen with a wide-eyed look.

“He just said the exact thing you said,” Lavi breathed, as though Allen hadn’t heard him.

He rolled his eyes a little, lips plucking up at the corners. “I didn’t say that exact thing.”

“But you said something _like_ it,” Lavi insisted, then glanced suspicion through the crack in the door.

“I don’t even know what you’re _trying_ to get at,” Allen said, and reached down to pick up the bags Lavi had dropped.

“There’s a conspiracy here somewhere,” Lavi said, staunch, and Allen’s snorted scoff mirrored the one that came through the door. Lavi’s eyes, somehow, grew wider. He glanced quickly between Allen and the homeless man. “Are you,” he said slowly, “the same person? No,” he shook his head quickly, “you’re, um. You’re…” His face cleared and he snapped his fingers. “You two are the homeless people!” he announced, glowing smile directed at Allen. “Wait,” he continued, quickly turning back to contemplation, “does that make me… Godot?”

“I’m not homeless,” Allen said with a small shrug. “Obviously. I’m not the one sitting out in the hallway waiting for someone to invite me to steal their shit like a real live Arsene Lupin. Or a hobo vampire.”

“Scathing commentary of my unfortunate position aside,” added the man outside the door, dry amusement lacing his voice, “the point is that we’re all homeless and there is no god.”

“Well, no,” Allen frowned, taking a couple of steps to the door and shouldering Lavi aside to peer through the crack, “because there’s also the man who fancies himself something to be revered as the ideal, and the slave who dances to entertain him.”

A slim dark brow arched above the rim of the man’s thick glasses, a question.

“Well,” Allen huffed, rolling his eyes a little, “you have the two homeless people settling for degradation while waiting for Godot to save them, you have the bourgeois, and the proletariat class dancing when they say ‘dance’. _You,”_ Allen stressed, “are a homeless man waiting for God. I’m a slave who thinks because the rich people told me to think, and Lavi is without a doubt Godot.”

“How so?” was all the homeless man had to say. “Is he going to let me use the balcony?”

“No,” Allen said, and flashed him a sugary sweet smile, eyes slipping closed with his grin, “but you’re going to keep sitting out here waiting for him to.”

He closed the door smoothly, a gentle and effective punctuation to his on-the-spot analysis of a play he’d seen once maybe six months ago. Walking towards the kitchen, he grinned when he heard the man’s quiet laughter through the door and lifted he and Lavi’s shopping trip spoils onto the bench with an odd feeling of victory.

“I have _never,”_ Lavi said, digging into the bags to pull out the salt and vinegar chips, “heard _anyone,”_ he punctuated by tearing it open, “talk shit the way you do.”

“Aww,” Allen shrugged his shoulder in mocking endearment, casting Lavi that same sweet smile and reaching into the packet to take some chips, “thanks, Lavi. I’ve never heard someone invite a questionable stranger into conversation like you.”

“Look,” Lavi pointed at him with the packet, put some chips in his mouth and bit down with a loud crunch. Speaking through them, he said, “Are you gonna _keep_ talking shit, or are you gonna thank me for the opportunity to prove your tertiary education is actually doing you some good?”

“I could not have said half of that half as quickly if I was sober, so I’ll throw in a bonus and thank you for the weed too,” Allen grinned, and tore open the packet of skittles.

* * *

 

It seemed a bit late to remark upon, but: Allen smoked marijuana and he enjoyed it. It happened.

And then it kept happening.

It was hardly what Allen would call a habit - no more a habit than it was for him to crack a beer or two on a Friday night. Just that when he _did_ crack those beers, Lavi more often than not would emerge from his den in boxers and a bandana with a bamboo bong in one hand and the engraved brass bowl of weed in the other, and ask Allen if he wanted a cone.

And Allen just… said yes.

It was _fun,_ and it wasn’t as though it dragged on him any more than those beers did. It wasn’t as though he was _suffering_ from getting high with his best friend.

But as those weekends slipped by and the months rolled past, Allen began to realise that he was suffering without it.

Not through withdrawals, or anything to that effect, it was just. It was just how he _was._ It was just _who_ he was. It was his messy past and his messy upbringing and the mess of his ingrained mentality. Without a distraction, Allen’s brain tore itself to shreds and that was just _who he was._

So he smoked, because getting high with his best friend was the kind of distraction that _stopped_ the brewing hurricane of his own thoughts. He smoked more, then more and more and more until he was saying yes to each of Lavi’s offers for a sesh. Because it was the only thing that felt good in a world that felt like it was falling apart around him.

He knew it wasn’t helping. He _knew_ there were better things to do, better ways to get out of the rut his own thoughts had driven him into.

But that wasn’t what Allen wanted, and Lavi had always helped him with those kinds of ruts anyway. One way or another.

It didn’t change the fact that there were bad days, of course. That was just life. But it was… reassuring to have something up his sleeve for those days. Maybe it wasn’t an ace of professional therapy, but a pair of twos still had a chance.

One of those bad days caught him with the momentum of a freight train, all the niggling frustrations and anxieties he’d been ignoring crashing into him with a carefully aged and distilled punch. It had him walking back to he and Lavi’s apartment from the bus stop at about the time his class was starting.

A haunting kind of hopelessness had settled itself cold and heavy into the marrow of his bones. Dread swallowing his panic down, down, down until it felt like the terror was choking and drowning deep in his chest. And really - _really._ It was just the same old shit.

Just the same old everyday shit that had been growing on him and growing and growing and growing and leaving his wallet at the apartment had been the brisk wind that had snapped the camel’s spine and pulverised its legs under the weight of its own self-flagellation.

And, you know. Usually he didn’t mind the rain.

It always made him think of Cross, and that wasn’t always a bad thing. But it had been drizzling when he’d dashed out of the building five minutes late, and in the ten minutes it had taken him to run to the bus stop, catch his breath, hail the bus, realise he didn’t have his wallet, and sit in the shelter trying to breathe deeply so he wouldn’t scream or cry or just tear his fucking hair out of his skull, the light drizzle had picked up into a stinging shower.

He was cold and soaked through and his distracted feet had found a pothole - so not only was his canvas bag surely starting to soak up the rain, but his shoe was full of gritty water and his leg was drenched halfway up his shin.

But, you know. It was fine.

It was _fine._

He wasn’t having a breakdown in the middle of the street and he hadn’t been passed by a car travelling fast enough to be worth jumping in front of, so he was really. Really. Fine.

He made it back to the building with his shoulders tight, head ducked, the unintentional tightness of his jaw working a headache into his temples. His chest was a churning mess of agitation and frustration, the urge to sob or scream sitting right below his clavicle.

As soon as the elevator doors started to close, Allen let his eyes slip shut and slumped back against a mirrored wall, hands curled around the banister tight enough to turn his knuckles white. The doors caught and he jolted up instinctively, eyes flashing open.

Allen blinked at the same homeless man who had talked _Waiting for Godot_ with him that one time, took a moment to recognise him, and put a smile on his face so his scowl wouldn’t have to weigh on anyone else.

It wasn’t hard to keep his voice level.

It was distressingly easy, in fact.

“Morning,” Allen greeted pleasantly, and wondered if the guy really did have family here or if he was just… casing the joint or something.

“A good one?” the man arched a brow and his mouth twitched a little in amusement. “Doesn’t look like it,” he commented, pulling his glasses off to clean the rain from them.

Allen blinked at him for a moment, caught out by his words and the pretty mole under his eye. Um. Words. Words, yeah. “It’s only nine,” he gave a small smile, didn’t have to check his phone to know it was a quarter past, because nine was when his class started and he’d been keeping an anxious eye on the clock until that moment came and went before forcing himself out of the bus shelter and trudging home.

Part of him was outraged when the man put his glasses back on. It was offensive, somehow. He was beautiful, but now he just looked like an unwashed homeless man caught out in the rain, and that was just. Allen was offended.

“Didn’t take long for things to go sour then,” he commented with a grin, and Allen wished elevators weren’t paved in mirrors because there was nowhere for him to look that the man wouldn’t see his smile slip into a quick scowl. He laughed at Allen a little, but it didn’t sound mean in the least. Almost sounded as though he was _agreeing_. “We’ve all had those,” he grinned and leaned against the wall.

“More and more, lately,” Allen sighed, no longer bothering to hold up that smile, what with this guy on the same page and the elevator doors sliding open anyway.

“So what’s up?” he asked, stepping out of the shaft with Allen.

He scoffed a laugh and dug in his pocket for keys, stopping mid step to sigh bitterly when he realised he’d left them inside. “Well, it started when I stubbed my toe on the door,” he gritted, falling back into step, “and hopefully it’ll end with me forgetting my keys.”

The man sucked in a sharp breath and winced in sympathy. “Hate to think what happened in between it all,” he offered as condolence.

“It is what it is,” Allen shrugged and came to a stop at his door, rapped his knuckles sharply on the wood.

“How many times have you told yourself that today?” he laughed and did the same at the neighbouring apartment.

Allen paused, tilted his head and considered. “A number of times, at least,” he stated, not at all an answer. But he honestly didn’t know, so whatever.

Lavi wasn’t opening the door so he was either in the shower, out shopping, or still asleep. Allen was betting on the last.

Pulled his phone out of his pocket to try calling him and found the screen wouldn’t turn on. Like, it was just. Dead. Hopefully because he hadn’t remembered to charge it, possibly because he’d just been thoroughly rained on.

He closed his eyes and slumped against the door, forgot what’s-his-name was there for a moment and breathed, _“Fuck.”_

“Here.” Allen peeled open his eyes to see him almost-grinning, holding his phone out to Allen with the facebook search bar open. “Message him,” he offered, definitely amused.

“I feel bad, considering we didn’t let you use our balcony,” Allen offered an abashed smile and accepted the phone, typing in Lavi’s contact.

He shrugged, still grinning, and reasoned, “Probably the cleverer thing. If I wasn’t me, I’d say you made the right choice.”

Allen laughed a little and pushed his wet hair from his eyes, thanked whatever gods were listening that Lavi didn’t give two fucks about online privacy, and opened a message to him. “Do you, too, often refuse to help strangers?” he asked with a genuine smile, the opposing evidence in his hands.

“Not if they’re pretty young men,” he smiled.

Allen didn’t _feel_ creeped out, but he probably only felt that way because he’d seen what this man was hiding behind those ugly ass glasses of his, and he admittedly felt quite shallow that his entire perception had changed because of that.

Also because he’d offered Allen his phone at the end of a very long, very brutal morning, but Allen was on a mission with these self-destructive thoughts, and considered that to be secondary. He was vain and kind of an asshole and this guy was helping him anyway.

Allen, naturally, was going to hate himself a little bit.

“So you know how that didn’t sound creepy in your head?” he said regardless of his actual impression, and handed the phone back with an amused laugh.

“You don’t sound creeped out,” the man countered with a grin and murmured, “Excuse me a moment - my cousins are ignoring me again,” before turning to knock loudly on the door, enough to shake it a little against the latch. _“Open this goddamn door or I’m leaving,”_ he threatened, and Allen only realised how warm his tone had been with him once he’d heard it all icy with frustration. “Sorry,” he offered to Allen with a graciously abashed smile, his demeanor immediately melting back into… polite flirtation? “They’ll be along in a moment.”

Sure enough there was a short clamour from within the apartment and Allen arched his eyebrows at the childishly put-upon voice from the other side which cried out, “Mommy, the stinky man is threatening us again!”

“I can smell him through the door! He’s not leaving!” came a second muffled voice.

Allen arched his brows at the exhausted-looking, scraggly dressed man in front of him and murmured, “Stinky man?” despite kind of understanding where they were coming from. Not that he smelled noticeably of anything, except perhaps a faint musk of cigarettes, but he kind of… kind of looked like he _should._

“They think they’re funny,” he muttered back and kicked the door lightly, eliciting shrieks from inside. “Road!” he pleaded, a tone louder. “Make them open the door!”

“I dunno,” came a third voice, light and teasing and probably ready to lock the man out forever just for a laugh, “did you shower before you came here?” she giggled and Allen couldn’t help but snicker at the man’s frustrated scowl.

“If Lavi comes soon,” he offered between stifled laughs, “you can use our balcony.”

He sighed and began to mutter, “That just might be nece- _un_ necessary,” he corrected himself sarcastically when the door finally wrenched open and a blonde head peeked out.

“Who’re you whispering to, Stinky Tinky?” the person (Allen just… really couldn’t tell if they were a boy or girl or what) taunted from the opening.

“Weak,” he commented drily and slipped his foot in to jam the door open before his cousin could slam it again. Turning to Allen with his shoulder pressed against the door, he smiled and graciously offered in that warm voice, “Have a good day, boy. You deserve one,” before shoving it open and slipping in amidst shrieks, curses and villainous cackles.

Allen realised he was laughing and leaned himself against the wall between their doors, his grin slowly dropping to a small smile as their arguing voices disappeared into the apartment. In the next half-minute he realised that while that soul-deep weariness was still crushing down on him, the suffocating swirl of agitation and inadequacy in his chest had flattened and smoothed, eased by the hobo-man’s charming laugh and easy words.

He gave the extraordinary impression that he carried his mood around with him like a charismatic sun, leaving a few rays with whoever he touched.

Incredible, and Allen was still smiling when Lavi made it to the door all scowly and bed-head-y and ready to throw a pouting fit. “I’m muting you from now on,” he glared daggers at Allen and left the door open for him.

“Surprised you even woke up,” Allen’s grin was back and he followed Lavi to the kitchen where he was putting on the kettle, door swinging shut behind Allen.

“After fifty messages?” Lavi grumbled and tossed his phone on the bench. “And who the heck is Tyki?”

Allen snorted at his strange use of censorship and pulled the phone closer, unlocked it and opened Tyki Mikk’s messages while Lavi set about scrounging up some breakfast.

Something like… yeah, about fifty messages, all reading ‘oi’, and then one like ‘go get your pretty friend he’s waiting miserable outside and both of us being locked out means neither of us are getting in’ and another along the lines of ‘I’m going to climb into your apartment and beat you with a pillow in a minute’ then something like ‘wit hmy duck actuakfjdzxxxxxxccxxxxxxddv’ and then ‘please disregard that last one’ and at this point Allen was laughing again and Lavi looked like he was struggling not to.

“I can't believe he did that,” Allen snickered and dropped his head, pushing the phone back to Lavi.

“Oh wait,” Lavi squinted as his phone chimed, “there’s more.” He snorted and passed it over, yawned and scratched his stomach while he poured cereal into a bowl.

Allen grinned and read it aloud, “‘honestly though offence intended you’re simply a horrible person if you let him keep looking that sad. It’s like he saw a rabbit get slaughtered or something.’ Oh there’s another,” he remarked, laughing hard enough to scrunch his nose up. “Here,” he read, “‘mister eyepatch, if you do not want to be that slaughtered rabbit, I suggest you wake up immediately’ aaaand,” he continued, typing a message of fervent reassurance when another came in, “‘I would hate for him to have to see that; please don't force my hand.’ Oh my god,” he laughed, pressing send and sliding the phone back to Lavi, who had settled in to eat his dry cereal with his fingers. “There’s no milk, by the way,” Allen remarked, an entire minute too late.

Lavi looked down at his bowl in surprise, then glanced nonplussed at Allen. “Isn’t there?” he asked, and lifted his fingers to his mouth. “Oh,” he added, glancing at his phone when it chimed. “He says… ‘smiley face’. Well, not like,” Lavi rolled his eyes and made an annoyed sound. “Like, ‘colon, close parenthesis’,” he corrected. “Who _is_ this guy?” Lavi squinted and leaned over the screen, tapping onto his profile. “Holy _fuck,”_ he stated sharply, squinting harder and leaning closer. “He’s hot as _shit,_ no wonder you aren’t diving into the shower.”

“Why would I be diving into the shower?” Allen scowled, coming around the bench to peer over Lavi’s shoulder.

“Um,” he remarked blatantly, pushing the phone for Allen to see, “because he’s flirting outrageously and I’ve never seen you react positively to that, ever?”

“Was that flirting?” Allen asked, looking down at his profile picture - a gorgeous photo of him, cheekbones and all, with the glasses pushed up into his rugged hair, a cigarette burning between his smirking lips and a well-tailored suit showing off the set of his - _wow,_ broad - shoulders. Like. No offence, but holy _fuck._ It was more than Allen had ever imagined. “Oh my _god,_ I hope that was flirting,” he breathed, swiping for the next photo.

Lavi snorted and crunched some cereal. “He called you pretty, dude. And said he’d slaughter me to appease you.”

“Actually,” Allen corrected, eyes locked on the black-and-white fucking studio image of his profile - convex nose and shapely chin and gorgeous fucking lips and just - _god,_ “he said he _wouldn’t_ slaughter you to appease me.”

“I mean,” Lavi grumbled, “isn’t that _more_ impressive? If he’s given to that sort of thing,” he amended with a snort and continued, eye squinting distantly, “but he’s the one who brought up slaughter in the first place - and rabbits _,_ no less… so maybe he _is_ given to that sort of thing,” he hummed in consideration.

Allen frowned at Lavi, took a surreptitious sniff of his shoulder and announced, _“Hmmmmmmmm.”_ After a long second Lavi looked back at him, still crunching his dry cereal, and Allen denounced in a heavily fake Australian accent, _“I_ smell mara-waaaaa-naaa!”

Lavi snorted and choked in Allen’s face and turned to bend over the bench while he laughed, coughing up the cereal he’d inhaled. _“Fuck,”_ he wheezed, laughing and struggling to breathe. “Holy _fuck_ we have to watch Big Lezz,” he cackled and Allen might have considered saying no, might have decided to take his wallet and try make it to his second class of the day - probably would have done it, but for that crushing exhaustion still weighing him down.

He could smile, yeah. And he could laugh and talk shit and be flirted with by a surprisingly handsome probably-not-homeless man. But that wasn’t what this was and he knew it would only take something like getting splashed by a passing car for him to want to walk in front of the bus instead of get on it.

So maybe staying home and getting high with his best friend was the preferable option for a day like today.

He shot one last look at that profile image of Tyki Mikk and grinned, tossed Lavi his phone and said, “I can’t believe you stopped to smoke a cone before letting me in.”

* * *

 

Through the familiar vitriol of self-destructive thoughts, Allen realised with desperate, crushing panic that he was in a downspiral.

Like cataclysm reaching a crescendo, his marks for the semester read forty-three, thirty-six and fifty-two. He hadn’t passed.

Not a single class.

He fucking…

His throat curled and crushed tight under the weight of terrified disappointment, his eyes ached, bone-deep exhaustion dropped from his lethargic limbs.

He wanted a cone, he didn’t _want_ to keep looking at six months amounting to failure. Began to push the laptop off his legs and made it halfway off his bed before he clenched his jaw tight enough that he could feel his teeth protesting, temples throbbing with a sharp headache on the rise.

He shouldn’t have a cone.

He shouldn’t smoke.

He shouldn’t go and get high after this shit.

That should have been a reward for doing well, not a consolation for his failure. It never should have been a contributing factor, but it _was._ He’d fucked up. He’d gone and fucked himself and it was no-one’s fault but his own.

Lavi smoked with him, yes. Lavi offered him a sesh now and then. But Lavi couldn’t open Allen’s mouth and talk for him. Lavi wasn’t the one who’d said _yes_ every time he offered.

He locked his jaw, locked his hands in tight fists around the corners of his laptop. Kept himself rooted on his bed and forced himself to _look._ To look at his failure, and understand what it meant.

He breathed deeply, forcefully. Lips twitched in a sneer of self-disgust, and refused to let himself cry. He didn’t deserve that act of pity. It was his fault, and they were his consequences. So he’d _deal with it._

He’d pull himself together, stop with the stupid, _stupid_ distractions, and fix his mistakes. He’d stop smoking. That was where he’d start.


	2. million man

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this happened later than i wanted, and in some places better than i expected. i am too tired to edit

A roiling blackness, sharp and barbed, hand long since lived in Allen’s chest. 

He didn’t know when it had taken up residence, but the first time he realised it was there had been a nondescript day for a nondescript fourteen-year-old who had taken to sleeping in maths class on days when his guardian had kept him awake at all hours someway or another. 

With drunken revelry, on occasion. More often, heated arguments with almost-strangers who Cross claimed he didn’t know. Arguments that lasted hours and hours into the night, and only ended when he bellowed that he had a fucking  _ kid  _ here, what did they think they were they  _ doing?  _

And when that shallow entreaty never worked, his inevitable suckerpunch came - that even people in  _ this  _ neighbourhood called the police for domestics.

The noise usually dropped off, and Allen usually sat awake on the furthest edge of his bed, back pressed into the corner of his room. Sat awake for hours and hours into the night with his eyes locked on the slender strip of light that filtered beneath his door from the hallway, hand curled tight around his swiss knife. 

The only gift Cross had given him, bar clothes, a bed, and a roof over his head. 

There was a tragedy in Allen’s heart that he had always thought was a shroud of exhaustion which never lifted, for that he could never bring himself to sleep soundly in Cross’s house. 

When his maths teacher kicked at the leg of his desk and told him he’d never be worth anything if he didn’t work for anything, Allen’s sleep-addled mind was more vicious darkness than conscious thought, and his nails dug sharp and cruel against the palm of his hand with the mindless, savage desire to snatch the swiss knife from his pocket.

Because he was so sick of all the noise, and he just wanted to sleep. 

He just wanted some  _ relief. _

And that, he thought a moment later, flooded panic and regret for a thought he hardly recognised as his own, was  _ very  _ unlike him.

* * *

 

It was easy to cut himself off. It was really quite simple. He needed weed no more than he needed a beer or two on a Friday night, so he stopped drinking too as if to prove to himself how easily he could do it.

And he did it very easily. 

He told Lavi he was going to cut down, and Lavi shrugged easily and stopped offering to sesh. They kept to the same routines and things returned to a familiar normalcy. Allen never saw Lavi smoke, and rarely smelled it in the apartment. If he came home to a lingering, weedy smell, Lavi usually waved his through the air as though to disperse it and called out an apologetic, “Sorry ‘bout that, man.”

Allen quickly gave up on the drinking aspect of things - rationalised that alcohol wasn’t his problem, and took back to having a beer or two on Friday nights. Resolutely after his classes, and a determined but reluctant hour or so of forcible study. 

The first two months of his first semester in the new school year passed without even the desire to smoke - beyond the semi-regular thought that he could if he wanted to, which was quickly followed up by the reminder that no, he  _ didn’t  _ want to. 

And… well, he supposed that was good. 

He wasn’t smoking, after all. He was studying - probably less than he _should,_ but he had never been particularly bookish. 

He didn’t feel any different. No better or worse. Still given to more bad days than good, but that was how things had been long before Allen had discovered that Lavi smoked weed.

More bad days than good, and more and more and more, and it was always a bittersweet relief that came with the winter holidays. He was loath to be out on familiar city streets at this time of year, and the weather had little to do with it. Fewer distractions in the form of classes, but fewer people to remind that he was okay, he was alright, he was  _ fine. _

He was  _ always  _ fine.

“Tis the season,” Lavi said when he caught Allen leaning against the frame of the sliding door, a cool draught whispering through their apartment, Allen’s fingers gone numb around the cup of coffee he’d forgotten in his hands. 

He blinked away from the periwinkle sky, so cold and high and empty. A nonchalant hum of question fell from his lips, and instinct and history told him Lavi’s wry smile was something to make him wary. 

“You right?” he asked, standing in the undefinable cusp of the lounge room and kitchen, a bowl of dry cereal in his hand. 

“I’m fine,” Allen said, and pushed up from the door, stepped out into the bitingly cold balcony. “I’m always fine,” he reminded with a thoughtless smile, and slid the door home along its tracks. Sat himself in his armchair and curled his knees up against his chest. Put his coffee on the low table between his and Lavi’s empty seat, and settled his expression to look as though he was enjoying the view, the crisp weather, and a long-cold cup of coffee.

He had a few minutes to settle into the silence of cars and the occasional truck rumbling noisily along the street below. A few minutes for something as cold and familiar as an early winter breeze to settle into his bones, slip icy fingers between the gaps of his ribs, to clutch creeping threats at his lungs, his heart.

Lavi dragged open the door, a loose knit blanket thrown around his bare shoulders, bowl of dry cereal still in his hands.

He leaned his hip against the asbestos panel of the balcony, and Allen pretended he didn’t see him there, picking at his cereal. Kept his eyes pinned on the distant sky that was all he could see from their uninspired balcony.

Lavi’s nonchalance cut through the brittle air, too unconcerned to fool either of them. “Wanna come shopping?” 

Allen shifted a glance to him, more cursory than encouraging. 

“We need food,” Lavi shrugged, and gestured with the bowl in his hands as though dry cereal were his last choice rather than his first. “And I’ll buy you pizza buns,” he added, dipping his fingers into the muesli and scooping it into his mouth, ground sharp between his teeth.

Allen let his eyes slip away, caught by the black flicker of a bird flitting across the slender strip of sky. “You don’t have to,” he said, and picked up his cold coffee to have something to do with his cold hands. “I’m fine.”

Lavi’s eye narrowed like a flicker of challenge, and he crossed his ankles. “Y’know what ‘fine’ stands for?”

A sigh fell past Allen’s lips, fanning disturbed ripples across the surface of his coffee.

“Freaked out,” Lavi listed on his fingers, “insecure-”

“Neurotic and emotional,” Allen finished for him, cutting a sharp, cool smile. “I’m _okay,_ Lavi.”

“You know what OK stands-”

_ “Oh-Kay,” _ Allen interjected with a telling roll of his eyes. 

Lavi pursed his lips, not at all satisfied with that. “You’re really happier sitting around here moping?”

“I’m not,” Allen muttered, forced himself to take a long mouthful of the icy coffee. “I’m not moping.”

“Really,” Lavi snorted. “It’s like Mope City all up in here,” he commented, dry as the wind that brushed past them. 

A short silence fell between them, Lavi waiting for some rejoinder. Allen’s fingers twisted around his cup, eyes pinned resolutely on the sky.

“Why not?” he demanded at length, letting the pretense fall away.

Allen’s teeth caught on the inside of his lip and he bit down slowly. “I don’t,” he started, then stopped. Eyes flickered to Lavi, and then down to the cup in his hands. “I’d rather not,” he settled on, “go outside. In this weather.”

As though it was anything less than crisp and beautiful, perfect for a stroll to the shops.

“Is outside bad?” Lavi prompted, and Allen watched the hand he leaned against the banister, fingers curled to lay out of the bounds of their apartment. 

“Outside isn’t _bad,”_ Allen said, lips twisting in discomfort. “It’s just that inside is good,” he rationalised. “Bad things can’t happen when it’s good.”

Lavi ducked his head and snorted a laugh. “Plenty of bad things have happened here,” he reminded, not helping in the least. “Did you forget the time Kanda broke in and stole our painkillers and threw my weed all over the floor?”

“You’re not helping in the least,” Allen informed him, muttered over the rim of his coffee.

Lavi sobered, nodding.

“Alright,” he allowed, lifting his hand from the rail in supplication. “The thing is,” he said, “I have to go to the shops anyway, and if I leave you alone I have a feeling you’re gonna freak out.”

Allen’s lips twisted in irked distaste, but couldn’t say anything to that.

“Whereas if you come with me,” Lavi proposed, pushing up from where he was leaning, “you’ll get a distraction and food and some award-winning company.”

Allen arched a brow at him.

“Are you tempted?”

“No.”

“Too bad,” Lavi shrugged and meandered back into the apartment, reaching out to pluck Allen’s coffee from his hands as he passed. “You’re coming anyway.”

Allen sat on the balcony for a long stretch of slow seconds with empty hands and an empty chest. Watched the shadow of a bird flicker across the eggshell blue of the sky, so hollow and far away. Wondered if he could get away with sitting there, staying there, letting the ice in the dry air cool his blood until he petrified into stone. 

Calcified lungs and a leaden tongue.

Had to remind himself that wasn’t something he should want, and pushed himself up to follow Lavi with too much reluctance clinging like a film of drab exhaustion over his skin.

* * *

 

The twenty-fifth of December dawned a week later without much ceremony at all, and Allen had every intention of sleeping in. Stomach curled nauseous from a few drinks with Alma and Kanda and Lena and Link, because each of them had plans for Christmas Day and premature birthday wishes to go.

It was fine.

His birthday had never been something worth celebrating. 

He’d been anticipating a ten o’clock wake up - there or thereabouts. But he’d forgotten to change his alarms to match his holiday schedule, so he was jolted bleary and vaguely nauseous at six in the morning with only enough function to swipe the alarm off. 

Which left him to be awoken, again, at six-thirty by his backup alarm.

And again at seven, by his backup’s backup. 

Sleep was, at that point, more an expression of stubborn frustration than anything.

Regardless, he only signed it off as a failed attempt when Lavi swung his bedroom door open hard enough to have it slam into the long-worn dent the handle had beaten into the plaster wall. A sharp, startled sound of surprise forced out of Allen in a bitter groan when Lavi threw himself bodily across his back with a wild, victorious yell, crushing him indiscriminately against the mattress.

“BIRTHDAY BOY, BIRTHDAY BOY!” Lavi chanted, vivid with energy, bouncing atop Allen such that short, pained groans were forced from his throat behind gritted teeth.

“Can’t  _ breathe!” _ he choked out, despite that Lavi  _ clearly _ couldn’t hear him over his own exuberant excitement.

“How old are you!” Lavi cried, his too-loud voice ringing in Allen’s ears, knowing full well that neither of them actually knew.

“Like,” Allen groaned, kicking Lavi off him and rolling away, “twenty? Or something?”

“Ooooo!” Lavi sang, snatching the pillow Allen tried to drag over his head so he could smack it across Allen’s stomach. “Double digits!”

“I’ve been double digits for ten years, dumbass!” Allen cried, kicking out at him and catching a corner of the pillow in his hand, locking them in a ferocious tug-of-war.

“Big Boy Allen!” Lavi yelled, deaf to Allen’s insistence, and all Allen could really counter with was a long, loud, frustrated yell as he gave up the fight for the pillow and covered his head with his arms when Lavi took that as invitation to keep beating him with it.

“If you haven’t cooked me breakfast,” Allen called over him, curled into a fetal position beneath Lavi’s unrelenting onslaught, “then that the  _ hell  _ is the point!”

“There’s a goddamn  _ smorgasbord  _ waiting for you,” Lavi announced with one more brutal hit, “at sushi train.”

“I can’t afford sushi train,” Allen groaned, distraught, slumping to stretch out. He grasped the corner of his duvet and rolled himself into it to curl himself back up into the warmth of abandoned sleep. 

“You can when I’m paying,” Lavi taunted, and Allen twisted with the weight of his own groan.

“I  _ can’t,”  _ he insisted.  _ “You  _ can’t. I eat  _ far  _ too much, and no-one ever stops me after the fifth plate.”

“I’ve been saving for this,” Lavi insisted, gripping the opposite corner of the blanket and dragging it insistently away from Allen, “so I totally can. And no-one is stopping anyone until the  _ tenth  _ plate.”

“Gonna get all the grey plates, just to prove a point. Hope you’re down for a fifty-dollar sushi train bill.”

“Y’know, as long as you don’t eat the calamari and throw up in my car on the way home? I think we’ll be fine.”

Sushi train was, it turned out, closed on Christmas Day. But the McDonald’s next door was open, so they took the drive thru and ordered  _ far  _ too much food, took it all back to their apartment and spread it across the coffee table like a buffet - with only a box of fries and a burger or two being eaten on the way back. 

Lavi managed to scrounge up some birthday candles that had seen better days, and pinned twelve into the top of a big mac bun. Lit them up with his old red lighter, the bottom corner melted black from punching cones.

Happy Birthday had a resoundingly hollow ring to it when it was only being sung by one voice - no matter how rambunctious and enthusiastic that voice might have been. But Allen was thrilled nonetheless, and struggled to blow out the candles on his slapdash cake through the grin stretching across his face. 

“Touch the bottom, and you have to kiss the closest boy,” Lavi teased with a narrow-eyed grin.

Allen rolled his eyes at how far he was determined to take this party of his, and pulled the scratched and worn swiss knife from his pocket with an annoyed huff. Flicked out the blade, slipped it between the bunched cluster of sad-looking candles, and cut a slice all the way to the flimsy cardboard of the burger’s box. 

“C’mere, idiot,” Allen groused, fighting a smile, and reached out to hold Lavi’s head between his hands, stretch up onto his knees and land an uneven kiss on his forehead. “I  _ hate  _ you,” he grumbled, pushing Lavi away so they both fell back with helpless laughter. 

“Right?” Lavi agreed, emphatic between his giggles. “Now,” he said, sobering, though that infectious grin persisted around the corners of his lips, “I know you’re cold turkey, and being clean is a wonderful thing, SO!” he announced sharply, slapping his hands to the table, “You are guilt-free to say no! But! I did happen by some bitchin’ indica and, as it happens, having your birthday on Christmas I think kind of gives you some leeway to indulge yourself. If you’re into it,” he reassured quickly, lifting his hands as though to allay any concerns Allen might have had about breaking his sobriety.

But, well.

He’d never needed it more than a beer or two on a Friday night, and it wasn’t as though he was dodging assignments right now.

A reward for hard work, wasn’t it?

So Allen shrugged with a small smile and said, “It’s Christmas,” like that was an excuse for celebration rather than a reason to give in to melancholy. 

Lavi whooped and pushed to his feet, both hands punched in the air. “Don’t move a goddamn INCH,” he commanded, already dashing to his room. 

Allen rolled his eyes and began plucking the candles from the top of the big mac before deciding that between the puncture wounds and melted wax, the top bun really was unsalvageable. So he picked it off, opened another burger box, and turned what should have been a chicken and mayo into a double-big-mayo-chicken-mac. 

Had he been there, Alma would have been inspired.

“I see you’re incapable of following simple instructions,” Lavi observed from the other side of the couch, and Allen glanced at him even as he pulled away from the McMonster, mouth full of too much burger.

“Obviously,” he tried to say around the bite in his mouth, but it ended up coming out more like ‘ombioshree’. 

“What.”

“Ya.” That, at least, couldn’t be easily misconstrued.

“‘Ya’ what,” Lavi prompted, arching an unimpressed brow. 

Allen opened his mouth, tried to say, “Food,” and ended up almost losing his entire disgusting mouthful of burger all over their banquet with the helpless laugh that choked out of him. “MMMMMMMMMMHHH!” he screamed, tight-lipped, and rolled onto his side with a hand pressed to his mouth while he frantically chewed, warring between his terrible birthday burger and hysterical, unstoppable laughter.

“You’re a lunatic,” Lavi snorted, swinging over the back of the lounge on his ass, hands full of bong and bowl. “Should we take this outside, do you think?”

“ ‘s cou’d,” Allen slurred through his burger, and Lavi monkey-footed the throw blanket off the couch to drop it over his head in answer.

“Nice weather,” he countered, already making his way to the sliding door and pushing it open with his toe. “And i’ve kinda gotten used to the place not smelling like weed, you know?”

Allen snorted a dry laugh and pulled the blanket down around his shoulders. “Kay,” he slurred, jaw working far too much effort to chew through his too-big mouthful. 

Outside  _ was  _ cold, but it wasn’t so bad. They still had their coats from the venture outside, and the sky was starting to look heavy. 

“Reckon it’ll snow?” Lavi asked falling into his seat and holding his bong and bowl out gingerly so they wouldn’t spill. 

“Not cold enough,” Allen shrugged, having finally managed to swallow down that burger. 

“It’s pretty still,” Lavi remarked, and Allen paused where he was standing, eyes out on the cloud-grey sky. Waiting for a whisper of wind.

A vague discomfort he couldn’t quite place twisted uncertainty in his stomach when he found Lavi was right; there wasn’t a breath. “It is,” he murmured, eyes distant on the horizon, looking for the edge of the silent storm, “isn’t it.”

“You right?” Lavi prompted, jolting him away from the weather.

Allen glanced back at him, startled, and cast one more curious look to the sky. “Yeah,” he said, taking his seat with his burger in one hand, the loose-knit throw held around his shoulders with the other. “Yeah, sorry.”

No winter weather was particularly good, Allen thought, but some were better than others. 

Skies gone too still an hour before sleeting rain sloshed over the city with half-formed icelike razorblades was better, in some ways, than clear skies that went on forever. 

Worse in other ways, he allowed, thinking of Cross and arguing strangers and a roiling anger that scared him more than the fights ever had. 

But it was better.

It was better.

“Want first cone?” Lavi prompted, packing from the bowl held carefully between his knees.

“Think I’ve forgotten how,” Allen laughed ,curling his legs up to his chest and putting his burger aside on the table between them.

“Go on,” Lavi snorted, holding out the bamboo bong and his old, dinged up lighter. “Like breathing,” he teased like an inside joke, “remember?”

“I swear,” Allen groused, taking them from him and holding the bong in the space between his knees and his hollow chest, “if you give me throat cancer on _Christmas,”_ he stressed, struck the flint and cast Lavi a level look, “I’m disowning you,” he threatened before lowering his mouth to the top of the bamboo stalk, bringing the lighter to the bowl and pulling the ember through the green. 

Easy as breathing.

“Did you know,” Lavi was saying sometime later, twirling a straight piece of copper wire with a loop curled at the end - blackened and dull from being used as a stoke, “what this is?”

“A piece of copper wire,” Allen answered simply before biting into his burger.

“Yes,” Lavi allowed, “but also. Not quite.”

Allen arched a brow. “Is it an alloy?”

“I mean,” Lavi said, then paused. “Probably,” he allowed. “BUT! Do you know what this copper wire _ is.” _

“A stoke.”

“Well,” he said, lips curling into a sly grin, and he levelled a knowing look at Allen, “it is  _ now.  _ This here,” he said, holding it up, “is a fanny nappy pin.”

“A fanny nappy pin,” Allen repeated, a touch incredulous, but far more intrigued.

“A fanny nappy pin,” Lavi confirmed with a sagely nod. “You know - way back, in the eighteen hundreds. They didn’t have tampons. Right?”

Slowly, trying to think if that checked out, Allen allowed, “Right.”

“So what the women did,” Lavi continued, sounding as lightly but deeply invested in his own story as Allen was, “is they would wrap cloths around one of these,” he said, holding it up, “and use it as a tampon. ‘s where the term ‘on your rags’ comes from, too.”

_“Really?”_ Allen stressed, and reached out to take the fanny nappy pin that Lavi handed out to him.

“Sure as God’s got sandals. That’s an original,” he added, gesturing to it while Allen spun it in his hands, examining every inch of the dirty, blackened copper. “From way back.”

_“No,”_ Allen said, squinting at it before turning a glance back at Lavi. “No way.”

“Yeah way.”

_ “Really?” _

“Would I fuck with you on this?” Lavi pressed, eyebrows arched, and Allen scowled vulgar disbelief.

“Yes,” he said, immediately and without hesitation. “Yeah, you would.”

A long, low snort dragged from Lavi before he broke into almost-silent laughter, doubled over his own knees. “Yeah,” he laughed, “yeah, I totally would. ‘s just a piece of copper wire,” he cackled, sitting up and picking up the bong from where they'd sat it on the table, shaking his head with his indulgent laughter. “Fanny nappy pin,” he snorted, packing the bowl.

“I hate you,” Allen scoffed, not quite able to hold back his own amusement, and dropped the stoke back on the table. “You absolute turd.”

“Gotcha,” Lavi snickered, striking the lighter and pulling his cone, lips still curled in an amused grin.

He got halfway through pulling the heavy smoke into his lungs before he was interrupted by someone, somewhere, enunciating a hearty sniff and calling out, “D’you guys know who’s Scott Green?”

Allen and Lavi paused, glanced at each other for all of a half-second before Lavi was hacking up a lung and demanding in a wheeze,  _ “What?” _

“Oh my god,” was all Allen could say, eyes locked on the head of the black-dyed emo-looking sonuvabitch that was leaning around the concrete divider between their balcony and the next.

“Uh…” Lavi choked, desperate to suck enough air into his lungs to speak, “Who’s… Scott Green?”

“I was under the impression you did,” the head reasoned, and sounded quite reasonable about it. 

Allen blinked at him, trying desperately to rationalise what, exactly, was happening. “There’s a head,” was all the conclusion he could really come to.

Out of sight, a weedy, warbling voice called out, “I smell marijuaaaaaaaaana,” and Allen found himself almost choking on his burger the way Lavi had just choked on his cone.

The head ducked away for half a moment to snap, “Shut UP, Jasdero, I’m tryna find Mister Green.”

Lavi, stuck on the riddle the head was posing them moreso than the head itself, started, “Mister-” and didn't get much further than that before letting out a thrilled screech and yelling, “OH MY GOD, WHO’S SCOTT GREEN,” before breaking down into uncontrollable, screaming cackles, slumping in his chair and curling in on himself, kicking his feet against the floor.

Allen, befuddled on all sides, began to ask, “Can someone tell me who Scott Green is?” and got exactly as far as saying the name before the connection hit him like a goddamn freight train and he fell back into his chair with wordless, wonderful disappointment. “Fuck,” he breathed at the ceiling, the floating head forgotten. “Fucking _fuck._ Who’s got green. God dammit.”

“You chasin’?” Lavi asked completely at ease with the entire transaction, his throat still rough from his unfortunate lapse in attention. 

“We got a stick,” the head offered, and Allen supposed that if it had a neck, and perhaps shoulders attached to that neck, it might have shrugged.

“We got a fiddy,” Lavi raised, and lifted the bowl like an invitation. “Want a cone or two?”

“Shiiiiiiit,” the head dragged out, incredulous despite that he had been the one asking in the first place, “you sure?”

“ ‘s Christmas, man,” Lavi shrugged with that easy grin of his, and he was still laughing when the head disappeared to tell its friend, the Disembodied Voice Called Jasdero, to go get the bowl because they were storming this motherfucker. 

“Want me to get the door?” Allen called out for them, though he wasn't entirely certain if a floating head and a disembodied voice really needed doors. They seemed to exist beyond the realm of reality, and such a thing seemed ludacris. But then again, they did seem stymied by the concrete divider between them.

“Nah,” came the head’s voice, shortly followed by the head himself, “we got this shit.”

And then - well, Allen supposed he wasn’t just a head after all, for the way he swung over the edge of the neighbouring balcony, shuffled around the divider, and clung to the edge of Allen and Lavi’s railing. 

“Holy fuck,” Lavi said, and Allen nodded agreement while a whole human person clambered over their balcony and brushed himself off like he hadn’t just been at threat of falling three stories to the ground and splattering all over the road.

Or maybe he’d have fallen into a passing dump truck and been absolutely fine. That, too, was a possibility.

“This seems familiar somehow,” was what Allen ended up saying, watching the head (who really ought to have a new name now, considering how short ‘head’ seemed to fall) stretch an arm back around the divider and return with what looked like the cap from a coffee grinder, covered in fine green-brown dust, with a healthy little pile of chop sitting in the dome.

"It was the homeless guy,” Lavi agreed, nodding intense intrigue at the two of them. “He wanted to use our balcony.”

“Right,” Allen realised. “I didn’t…”

“Believe him?” Lavi scoffed.

“Think it was actually possible,” Allen corrected while the disembodied voice followed the head over the balcony, “but yeah, that too.”

They sat in incredulous silence for a long moment, until the second of their two neighbours had joined them and Lavi seemed to come to the realisation that with four people and two armchairs, they were either going to have to start sitting on laps, or move inside. 

Allen, of course, only knew this because Lavi said so himself.

“It seems I’ve come to the realisation,” were his exact words, “that with four people and two armchairs, we’re either going to have to start sitting on laps, or move inside.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Jasdero said, and made as though to fall on top of Lavi before his counterpart caught him by his long, bleach-blond-messy-extensioned hair (it was at this point that Allen realised he had seen Jasdero before - once, very briefly - and felt he could reassure past-him that he was in fact a man despite his warbling voice and chaotic femin-emo look) and dragged him to keep standing.

“BITCH!” Jasdero screeched, clutching his head and twisting to strike out at Bitch like he was trying to gouge his eyes from their sockets.

_ “Inside,” _ Bitch stressed, and shoved Jasdero away from him in the vague direction of the sliding door. 

“We have food too,” Allen added, and wasn’t quite sure if he remembered standing - or, for that matter, walking to the door. 

But, well. He was standing, and he was walking through the door with a lovely weightlessness to his body. Numb tingles running below his skin, and it somehow felt like arousal but at the same time quite dissimilar. That is to say, he wouldn’t be surprised if he got a boner, but he didn’t think he would. Not unless he thought about it quite a lot, and his mind was altogether too busy trying to catch the frayed threads of a thousand abandoned trains of thought to think about it as more than cursory acknowledgement.

“I’m making myself at home,” Jasdero announced, slumping onto the couch in an exaggerated sprawl, “hope you don’t mind.”

“Go on, then,” Lavi taunted, slipping past Allen to join him on the couch with his bong and bowl in hand. 

“David…” Jasdero whined, stretching his arms out uselessly and splaying grabby-fingers in Bitch’s - now ‘David’s’ - direction.

“Such a _baby,”_ David groused, and tossed the grinder lid carefully to Jasdero, who screamed and lurched to catch it miraculously upright. “Oh SHIT,” he barked when he wheeled around, and honest to god took a whole step back, eyes on Allen. “What happened to your FACE?”

Allen arched a brow, took a moment to be impressed that he actually remembered  _ how  _ for how goddamn stoned he was, and didn’t comment when Lavi answered loudly from the couch, “He brought These Hands to a knife fight.”

Jasdero, airting on the couch beside him, took a keen interest in Lavi’s eyepatch. That is, he flicked it with a curious finger and asked, “So what happened to  _ your  _ face?”

“He was my backup,” Allen supplied simply, his smile teasing, and wondered if it didn’t hurt, or if he’d forgotten that hurting hurt, or if the weed just had him too numb to feel it.

Something about those two - Jasdero and David. Something about them reminded him of the people Cross used to say he didn’t know. Sharp wrists and skinny cheeks, and skin too white like they never went outside. 

It had him tense - tense and crowded with an exhaustion he’d never quite forgotten. But Jasdero had made himself at home and David had crawled across their balcony on a whim because they were all alone on Christmas Day and Lavi didn’t seem to mind either of them, and he was generally more perceptive of people’s character than Allen was because he’d never much been given the environment to develop a gut feeling. 

Or, if he did, he’d killed it in a desperate bid to find something to be happy about. Even if it was the wrong thing.

“Spewin’,” David was saying, laying himself out atop the backrest of the couch. “Out usual guy’s cut us off for a week, like. What dickhead dealer takes a Christmas Holiday?”

“Cross did,” Allen snorted a delicate laugh more from instinct than anything, because Cross, Allen knew now and had known without any certainty throughout his highschool years,  _ had  _ been a dealer. 

And the people who looked like Jasdero and David - the people with the sharp cheeks and skinny wrists and skin so pale they looked like they never went outside - the ones that argued with him late into the night and who he claimed he didn’t know. They'd never been around come Christmas Holidays, and Allen wasn’t so naive to think that it was a saving grace in his behalf. 

Whether that crossed his mind, however briefly, Allen couldn’t say, but from the way he drank more than usual and stayed out longer than usual and brought home more women than usual, Allen was inclined to believe he wasn’t the only one with not-so-fond feelings regarding Christmas. 

“You know Cross?” David demanded, shooting to sit up, and Allen froze on the spot with a smile clinging with clawed fingers to the bones of his face.

“What,” Jasdero added, Lavi’s bong in his hands, cone half packed, _“our_ Cross?”

“Shitass dick-for-brains Cross?” David clarified, looking right at Allen.

Allen forced a shrug. “I used to,” was what he said, because he didn’t see much charm in lying, even if he had the cause.

“No offence,” David said, clearly not meaning it in the least, “but FUCK that guy.”

“Yeah?” Lavi supplied with an arched brow.

“Yeah, actually,” Allen agreed easily, sincerely.

“The fuck kind of dealer puts interest on DRUGS?” Jasdero chimed in, seething.

“APPARENTLY,” David gritted, “we owe him, like. A goddamn bucketful of money. Never smoked half of it.”

Lavi, ever the voice of reason, asked, “So why don’t you try a new dealer?”

“Why, where do you get yours?” David pressed, eyes flashing quick to Lavi’s bowl. 

“Secret,” he said, and might have winked, but it didn’t really work what with the eyepatch and all. “Got a friend with a license. Grows medicinal, you know?”

“You prescribed?”

“Not medically, no, but I’m fuckin’ ADHD without it.”

“Can confirm,” Allen agreed, raising his hand like a vote. 

Lavi inclined his head as though Allen’s word was proof, and Jasdero asked, “Can you get prescribed for that, or is it all just. Y’know. Joint pain and, what, stress? And shit like that.”

Before Lavi could go on his well-rehearsed spiel about the legality of marijuana and its properties not only for pain relief but for tempered focus and wider horizons for creative and critical thinking, David had shot a patiently impatient glance to the bong sitting in Jasdero’s hands and commented blithely, “It’s a cone, not a microphone.”

“Yeah, man,” Lavi fell into the tease, shoved his shoulder against Jasdero’s, his grin more amused than scolding. “It’s a gentleman’s game. Don’t hold up play.”

Allen found his place on the floor by Lavi’s feet, at one point leaning against his shins and at some indiscernible time later with Lavi’s legs slung over his shoulders and Lavi’s hands in his hair, tying messy braids and chattering away amiably with Jasdero and David - Jasdevie, Lavi had taken to calling the collective. 

Over the interminable hours that they spent punching cones, grazing on McDonald’s and talking absolute shit, Allen decided he knew exactly three things about them.

They were erratic.

They were neurotic.

They were fucking hilarious in their idiocy. 

“No,” David was saying, “no no no. That is. Incorrect.”

“No, seriously,” Lavi insisted, so wonderfully earnest.

Jasdero, probably the less reasonable of the two, hesitated to say, “It sounds…  _ possible.” _

“No it DOESN’T!” David exclaimed, vexed, his hands tugging his hair. “No, it absolutely does NOT sound possible.”

“I’m tellin’ ya,” Lavi shrugged easily, and leaned back too casually on the couch. “Dogs can learn gravity.”

“They _can’t,”_ David insisted, and Allen was having difficulty muffling his snickers against his own knees.

“They totally can,” Lavi countered. “You can teach them.”

“How?” Jasdero asked, leaning forwards with an intensely curious sort of expression.

“Get a water bottle, right?” Lavi started, sitting up again to match Jasdero’s invested posture, “And when it wants to drink, you like. Pour the water out and have it drink from the stream, you know?”

_ “Really?” _

“NO!” David cried, so physically pained by his frustration that he actually thrashed and rolled sideways onto Jasdero’s lap. “Noooooo oh my GOD, that’s not teaching it GRAVITY, that’s teaching it how to drink out of a fucking WATER BOTTLE.”

“Initially, yeah,” Lavi allowed, “but they’re not as stupid as you think. They pick up on it soon enough,” he said with a wise nod. “That the water falls when you pour it.”

_ “Shit,”  _ Jasedero whispered, mesmerised.

_ “NO!”  _ David cried, deeply stressed by the wrongness of it all.

“Sorry,” Lavi said, sitting back and not sounding sorry int the least, “did I freak your mind?”

_ “Nooooooooo,”  _ he whined, still clutching his head, and Lavi nodded smug and satisfied as if that meant  _ yes.  _ Which, well. Honestly in a way it really did. 

It got dark while they talked shit and threw pickles from long-cold burgers at each other, and it was only then that Allen realised they’d essentially been hanging out and punching cones for just about the whole day. 

And it was only when David got a phone call that Allen realised that it was already half past nine, and almost ten hours had gone by with reruns from  _ That 70’s Show, Always Sunny in Philadelphia  _ and Lavi talking absolute shit. 

David, of course, was far gone enough to put the phone on speaker before even bothering to hear what it was about.

_ “Where the fuck are you?”  _ demanded a shrill, petulant voice, in turn without bothering to ask how David was, how his day had been, if he’d managed to find some way to enjoy his Christmas.  _ “I can hear you laughing like a hen laying an egg but we’ve been knocking on the door for, like,  _ **_actually_ ** _ ten seconds, so what the fuck is the deal?” _

“Ohhhhhhhhh,” the whole room seemed to coo in collective understanding before David took one for the team and admitted, “Just come to the next door down; we’re gatecrashing.”

All of two seconds passed before a demanding knock rocked Allen and Lavi’s door in the frame and Allen, ever the gracious host (more by default than anything, as no one made a move for a good couple of seconds) pushed himself to his feet, held a squat to ensure he had his balance, and stood up to let her (whoever ‘her’ was, though Allen had some idea. Some vague idea that related to Jasdero’s blond hair and long, pealing laughter) in. 

The knocking never really stopped while Allen walked to the door - just a continual deluge of demand. And by the time he got to unlocking the deadbolt, the childish voice which he’d heard through David’s phone was singing,  _ “I’m dreaming of a… white Christmas! Just like the ones I used to know~!” _

Allen couldn’t have known, of course, who he’d open the door to. 

Or, he supposed in his stoned state, perhaps he could have. If only he’d given half a moment to thought, and to why that girl’s voice sounded familiar, and to the only other single human being he knew who knew Jasdevie. 

But, well.

There Tyki Mikk was, the homeless guy with a soft spot for pretty young men, and Allen was altogether too taken with the fact he looked more like how he looked in his facebook profile pictures than he did like the scrubby sketchy greasy mess of a man who’d asked to borrow their balcony, to really even acknowledge the (admittedly) beautiful girl hanging from his arm. 

The girl, of course - who Allen could really only think of as Loli Bait - swung off Tyki’s arm and waltzed past him with all the bounding grace of a ten year old, her feet bare and her shoes hanging by the arch of the heel from Tyki Mikk’s finger. 

“Evening, boy,” he said, standing right in the doorway and smiling a smile that was altogether far far  _ far  _ too charming. A smile that said,  _ oh, hello again. Shall we pick up where we left off? _

Only, well. 

Allen wasn’t entirely  _ sure  _ where they’d left off. 

Something about favours not returned and homeless people waiting for God. 

Something about bad days and deserving the best.

“Hello,” was all Allen could really say. 

Tyki Mikk arched a delicate brow at him, and Allen wondered what had happened to his glasses. His eyes were truly something else without them, and there was something to be said about the way they creased around his teasing smile. “May I come in?” he said, and Allen might have been high but it seemed like he was taunting him with a  _ this time? _

“Of course,” Allen said, and took half a step out of the way because surely if he wanted to get in that badly he’d have brushed through without comment the same way his Loli Bait had. 

Allen wondered what that made Tyki Mikk, if he had Loli Bait’s shoes in his hand and what looked like her coat draped over his arm.

“What,” Tyki Mikk indulged as he stepped by, and his smile was definitely taunting this time, “not worried about the safety of your possessions this time?”

“I think,” Allen considered, “with the knowledge that Jasdero and David, of all people, could come and go as they please…”

“All about perspective,” Tyki Mikk finished for him, smooth and charming and so gorgeously,  _ gorgeously  _ amused. 

Allen thought he might have to rethink the whole arousal-boner thing. 

Then he thought he should probably  _ not  _ rethink it, considering getting a boner after a three-part conversation (which hardly counted as a conversation, let us be clear) was probably not the position he wanted to be in. 

In a hateful catch 22, however, Allen found that trying not to think about how easily Tyki Mikk’s smirk was getting under his skin really only made him think about it more. And, because he clearly had no control over himself or his thoughts or his eyes or his thoughts, again, they were the real culprit here, Allen really couldn’t help but find himself wondering what it might feel like to have that smirk pressed against his throat.

Or, you know. His thighs. 

“I-” he said, and cut himself off, because saying  _ I adore you  _ to an essential stranger after sharing what amounted to half a minute of collective conversation really felt like moving a step too quick.

Not to mention  _ I want you to fuck me  _ equally felt like a step too far. 

Though not entirely too far off the mark. 

“You?” Tyki Mikk said, pausing in the entryway half a step from Allen, all his wonderfully entertained amusement trained specifically on him.

“Me,” Allen agreed, and Tyki Mikk smiled as though he’d said something incredibly witty, and tantalisingly challenging.

Allen didn’t particularly feel either witty  _ or  _ challenging, so much as struck completely dumb, but the curl of Tyki Mikk’s lips and the lingering scent of some beautiful mixture of cologne and cigarettes and  _ him  _ left Allen standing with his hand curled too tight around the edge of the door, worried that his weed-weak knees might not be able to support him after all. 

“TYKI!” Jasdero cried as soon as he caught sight of who’d come in after the whirlwind of Loli Bait, “MY DUDE, MY GUY, SO GOOD TO SEE YOU!”

“We,” Tyki said (Allen wasn’t certain why he’d been clinging to his last name, but it almost felt too familiar to drop it. Too familiar, and not as flirtatious.) and sidestepped what could have been a hug or a tackle, “are not friends.”

Allen, drawn back to the group massing in the lounge room kitchen ish area, stepped up beside Loli Bait and said like a question with a glance shot to where the overcast skies had long since given way to sleet and mushy, icy rain, “But it’s not a white Christmas?”

“It’s almost ten,” David was saying at the same time, cutting Tyki with a demanding glower. “The fuck held you up?”

“Bullshit,” Tyki announced with the kind of calm, frustrated command of someone used to complaining in such a compelling manner, “Work. Christmas. Party.”

“Ya,” Loli Bait chimed in, shooting Allen a coquettish wink and hoisting herself up to sit on the benchtop. “What the fuck kind of business makes you go to a Christmas party  _ on Christmas?” _

“Yours, apparently,” Jasdero commented from the couch, unmoved from Lavi’s side, and added a sly, “dumbass,” in Tyki’s direction.

“Shut up,” Tyki bit out, carefully laying Loli Bait’s coat over the back of the sofa and placing her shoes on the floor beneath it. “I wouldn’t pull that shit,” he scowled, and dragged his fingers back through his neat hair, hand planted on his hip, his whole body a gesture of mocking distaste. “I have  _ far  _ better things to do. Talk to dickass Levellier about it. It wasn’t a Christmas party,” he added with a sneer, and gave Jasdero’s ear a sharp tug in what amounted to a greeting. “It was a fucking money wank.”

“What I don’t get,” David said with his mouth full of long-cold fries, “is why you go to charities at all.” He paused to swallow, and rummaged around in the bottom of the oil-stained cardboard box they’d come from. “You’re the  _ least  _ charitable person I know.”

“Yeah,” Loli Bait interrupted with a healthy roll of her pretty gold eyes, “but they’re  _ his charities.  _ Everyone loves an asshole who funds homeless shelters,” she added with a delicate shrug. 

“Plus,” Tyki added, rummaging in his pockets and pulling out his wallet and phone before shrugging off his long woolen coat, fitted gorgeously around his broad shoulders and slim waist, “non-for-profit donations are tax deductible. Not to mention the shares I have in the foundations that  _ are  _ for profit. Charitability,” he announced grandly, somehow making one of the most dry conversations Allen had ever heard into a warm, tasty treat Allen wanted to drink in forever, “is a money game.”

Loli Bait offered a long, amused snort to that and said, “You talk like you’re a silver spoon asshole, but I know for a  _ fact  _ you worked weekends in a soup kitchen while you were still Adam’s little protegee bitch.”

“Woah,” Tyki seemed to mock, sarcasm dripping like golden honey from his voice, “don’t make me out to be a bad person, or anything. But anyway,” he waved the rest of it off, shed the conversation like he’d shed his coat, and had his eyes on Allen when he said, a smile curling around his voice, “I heard someone asking about a white Christmas?”

Allen felt the need to straighten his shoulders, somehow. Be it the teasingly expectant look on Tyki’s face, or the way his impressive attention seemed to coalesce onto Allen in its entirety. It really was quite a confronting experience, being the center of attention for a man so effortlessly…  _ magnificent  _ was the word that came to mind, really. 

“It’s hardly the weather for it,” Allen ended up saying, and he felt a thrill for the way Tyki’s eyes creased around his amusement, beautifully visible without the cover of those ugly glasses of his. 

Whether he needed them to see or not, he ought to get new frames at  _ least. _

“Weather is…” Tyki started, offered, shrugged and studiously flipped open his wallet, pulled something from inside it, flicked it up and caught it in his palm. Something that caught the ceiling lights with a plasticky kind of reflection. “Transient,” Tyki settled on, and held the small money bag up between his fingers, full of a confrontingly white powder.

Cocaine, Allen realised with a hypnotised kind of speechlessness, and Tyki’s gorgeous - absolutely  _ gorgeous -  _ golden-brown eyes flickered away for only half a moment so he could toss the whole thing onto Jasdero’s lap before having them back to pin Allen to the spot. 

By chance, his desperate rationality tried to tell him, or accident. God, he was baked.

Too high.

Eyes probably red as the devil and Tyki Mikk was looking right at him with something like a promise and something like a taunt. 

And Allen was just gone enough to care. 

“A Christmas present,” Tyki announced to the room at large even when his eyes never left Allen’s, that compelling charisma dragging everyone’s attention inexorably back to him, “from someone I trust and respect.”

“Soooo,” David drawled, pinching the bag from Jasdero’s hands and holding it skeptically up to his own face, eyeing the white, “yourself?” He cut a glance to Tyki, mocking. “It could literally only be you.”

Tyki melted into an easy shrug. “You’re not wrong,” he allowed, somehow charming in his self-assured egotism. “But this is good quality,” he said, plucking it back from David and holding it almost out of reach as though to convey just how goddamn  _ important  _ it was. “None of that crack shit you guys smoke.”

“Excuse me,” Jasdero snorted indignantly, “we don’t smoke crack shit.”

“Oh,” Tyki commented, blithe, “so I must have imagined that crack shit you were smoking last time I was around.”

“That,” David countered, “was not crack.”

Tyki’s look was not impressed. Vaguely disgusted, in a way that somehow, stupidly, seemed to reassure the cold-curdled almost-anxiety that had been curling nervous in Allen’s stomach. “You know that doesn’t make it better, right?” Tyki said, and everyone in the room murmured general agreement. 

_ “Yesssssss,”  _ Jasdero dragged, reaching grabby fingers towards Tyki - or more specifically towards the baggie in his hand. “Gimme.”

“Christ,” he muttered with a subdued roll of his eyes, “manners.”

“You can’t use his name in vain,” Lavi commented from beside Jasdero, mockingly severe. “It’s his birthday, you know.”

“Yeah,” Tyki commented, dry as dirt, “well it’s mine too. So he can step down off that martyring high horse whenever he’s ready.”

Allen straightened, confusion shooting warm and comfortable through him, and Lavi shot up just the same. “What?” they seemed to say at the same time, and Tyki wasn’t quite sure which of them to look at.

“What?” he countered, almost defensive. 

Lavi pushed his lips in an appreciative pout, eyebrows arching up, and allowed, “Guess we’re celebrating three birthdays then, fuck yeah.”

“Three?” David prompted, pouring the last of the chip crumbs into his mouth.

“Dearest darling boy Allen here,” Lavi announced, flopped halfway off the back of the couch to gesture grandly at Allen himself, “is turning… uh.” He paused , clearly not having thought this far ahead. “Shit, um. Nineteen?”

Allen tilted his head with a considering hum and asked, “Did we settle on twenty?”

Lavi rolled a little, still flopped over the back of the couch, and tried to rationalise, “How old were you when you got your birth certificate?”

His lips pulled into a mocking smile, eyebrows pinched like it was a stupid question (it was) and he reasoned, “I don’t know, I didn’t have a birth certificate, did I?”

“Lucky for us,” Tyki Mikk supplied, a damning grin levelled right at him, his sly amusement pervasive enough to keep Allen rooted to the spot, “Road gets lightfigered with a few drinks.” He glanced away only to hold up the bottle of champagne sitting on the bench beside Loli Bait - Road, it seemed - and hung it loosely from his fingers before he proposed, “How about we pop a bottle and call it a twenty-first?”

Teasing, with an effortlessly cruel kind of edge laced into her voice, Road reasoned with a brutal amusement levelled at Allen, “If it’s your birthday, why are you celebrating with strangers?”

“Oh,” Allen huffed on a laugh, the pitfall drop in his gut going unnoticed, “don’t call me out like that.”

“I mean,” Lavi supplied with a derisive snort, “I’m already here, and it’s not like you can do much better than that.”

“Surely,” Tyki countered, nose wrinkling in an expression of delicate distaste, the tease almost lost to his scathing mockery, “he could.”

“What’s with all the McDonald’s?” Road asked, eyes scathing across the scattered mess of mostly-eaten burgers. 

“Sushi train was closed,” Allen shrugged.

“And Allen eats like a…” Lavi paused, tried to think of something. “Like a… like an I-don’t-know-what.”

Road’s hand darted out to catch the hem of Allen’s shirt and jerk it up, showing him off even as he yelped and flinched away, kept where he was by her surprisingly unforgiving grip on his shirt.

“I don’t believe you,” she announced primly, all eyes on Allen’s flat stomach. 

Tyki’s expression, when Allen couldn’t help but glance at him, filled with consideration and intent, tempered by that same sly amusement.

“He eats like shit,” Lavi grumbled, “and he’s got the body of a teenage boy.”

“Yeah,” Road laughed delighted agreement and finally let Allen’s shirt drop, poked his stomach with her toe, “the only body of a teenage boy I’ve got is in the trunk.”

Allen’s eyebrows crept up his forehead, and resounding silence lingered after her comment.

“I mean,” Tyki enunciated after a long moment, then paused as though truly trying to figure a way to spin that positively. “Kidnapping is great for core strength.”

“Can confirm,” Lavi said drily, “he doesn't kidnap people.”

“Maybe he’s born with it,” Jasdero shrugged.

“Maybe it’s clinical depression,” David countered, and Allen couldn’t help but duck his head on a laugh.

_ “Alright!”  _ Road announced, clapping her hands and rubbing them together like a… like a child on Christmas. Which didn’t seem  _ incorrect,  _ at least. “We gonna cut some goddamn lines or  _ what?” _

“Yeah,  _ Tyki,”  _ David taunted. “We gonna cut some lines or what?”

“Yeaaaahhh,  _ Tyki,”  _ Jasdero chimed in, his words sarcastically elongated.

But Tyki Mikk rolled his eyes at their forceful enthusiasm and worked to pop the champagne rather than let them rush him into anything. Shooting a glance and a small, almost apologetic smile to Allen, he asked, “Glasses?”

Allen took that as cue to slip around the other side of the bench and pull down whatever they had that passed for flutes. There was a pair, so cheap and light he was almost certain they were plastic, and three tall beer glasses that would probably have to do. The last was a large, plastic yellow cup which Lavi usually filled with cola and the cheapest, nastiest bottom-shelf whiskey he could get his hands on. 

“Solid effort,” Road commented, scathing in her amusement, and Tyki snorted half a laugh. 

“You can drink from the bottle, if you’d rather.”

“I rather,” she agreed primly, so Allen shrugged and upended Lavi’s plastic cup on the bench so Tyki only needed fill four of them. 

Meeting Allen by circling around the other end of the island counter, Tyki kept half a foot of distance between them, and seemed to let his presence melt from the room a little. It was difficult to describe, the way he gave some wordless command for everyone to divvy their attention amongst themselves, because not a single one of them was looking at him when he said in an undertone meant for Allen and only Allen, “Is that alright?”

The subdued privacy of his words shuddered in Allen’s nervous fingertips, and he framed his voice with an undercurrent of such beautiful honesty that Allen found he had no problem with it at all. 

In fact, even if he _ had, _ he didn’t think he’d have been able to speak up against the earnest way in which Tyki seemed inclined to put the drugs away and forget all about it if Allen so much as forced a smile.

“Of course,” he said, and smiled a real one because Tyki, in the bare minutes since he’d stepped into the house, had keyed in that Allen was perhaps the only one of them who’d have any such problem with it at all. Because Tyki had noticed that, and had cared enough to acknowledge it. 

Because he was wonderfully charismatic, and seemed able to control the ebb and flow of the whole room’s attention with all the subtle grace of a snake herding sheep.

Because he had cornered Allen off from the rest of them with no intention of biting so much as ensuring it was okay if he did. 

Because Allen, high and too full of nonsensical analogies, thought he might very much like for Tyki Mikk to bite him.

“Would you like to join?” Tyki offered, the shroud of delicate concern peeled away like a sheer cloth covering dark, rich velvet. Or perhaps cashmere. “It’s your party, after all.” Partway through filling the miss-match glasses, he let a glance fall to Allen with a grin curling one corner of his lips. “Your birthday.”

“I…” Allen started, and then stopped, because not only did part of him know (in the way everyone sort of knew and didn’t quite know  _ how  _ they knew) that cocaine was  _ expensive,  _ but beyond that he’d never… He’d never considered that he might, well. That he’d even  _ do  _ cocaine, that he’d ever. Be in that -  _ this - _ situation, be presented with the option.

Never thought someone would ask _would you like some cocaine?_ and expect an answer.

From the way Tyki spoke, though, easy and so familiar as to be kind, it truly did feel like an option. 

He could say no, and that would be fine. 

So he ended up agreeing, “Sure,” because the easiest way to make Allen Walker do something was to make him feel like he had a choice in the matter. “I mean,” he amended a beat later, his words confused and stumbling over his tongue, “if that’s…”

Tyki’s smile was addictive. The gorgeous look of it, the wonderful sensation of having it directed at him. “It’s Christmas,” he said, voice intoxicatingly smooth, curled like a smokescreen promise around Allen’s lungs. Insubstantial distraction for the way he passed one of the cheap plastic flutes to Allen, and let their fingers linger together in a gesture hardly accidental. 

“Where’s mine?” Lavi complained from across the room, pouting visibly when Allen lifted the glass to his lips to hide his coy smile.

“Sorry,” Tyki offered with a cursory, almost bored glance, not sounding sorry at all, “but I haven’t waited tables in at  _ least  _ ten years.”

“What does that make you?” Allen challenged, more a tease than an invested question. The answer wouldn’t change anything - _couldn’t._ He looked maybe a year or two older than Allen’s purported twenty-one, at the most.

“Let’s say,” Tyki Mikk allowed slowly, carefully, a smirk curling his lips, “I’m still in my twenties.”

Allen arched a brow. “So you’re close to leaving them, are you?”

Tyki laughed, and it was everything his smile promised it to be. Full-bodied, rich, as thick with flavour as a well-aged red. “Put like that,” he allowed in an undertone, leaned close to murmur like it was a secret, “I’d rather just say I’m twenty-eight.”

“Perhaps next time you should just say that, then,” Allen countered, his brow arched and his smirk hidden behind the blunt rim of his glass. “Twenty-nine today?”

“Twenty-seven yesterday,” Tyki Mikk corrected, and tapped the second flute with Allen’s in the indulgent little gesture of a toast. He smiled like a warning, eyes all narrow and amused, and proposed, “To Christmas, and birthdays, and not aging prematurely.”

“Sore spot?” Allen taunted, but drank all the same, Tyki’s rich laughter bouying him higher than any Moët in a plastic flute. 

“Should we sit?” Tyki proposed rather than deign to answer, and Allen picked up one of the half-filled beer glasses to take with him.

Stepping around Tyki, he allowed, “If you like,” and made a beeline for the lounge room.

Behind the couch, Allen leaned his elbows on the backrest with his hands draped over beside Lavi, the two drinks hanging from his fingers.

“Eyes right, soldier,” Lavi commented, blithe and amused. “He’s here for two minutes and you’re already giggling in the kitchen like a couple of schoolgirls stealing kisses?”

“Interesting analogy,” Allen observed, because he was paying quite a bit more attention to analogies than usual right now, and it really was quite an interesting connection to make. Allen wasn’t even certain it was a real saying. It  _ sounded  _ real, but he couldn’t remember ever having heard it before. And, in that vein, “Isn’t it meant to eyes front?”

“No?” Lavi snorted. “No, I  _ definitely  _ want you to hook up with him.”

“He brought cocaine to a Christmas party,” Allen reminded, as though either of them had forgotten.

_“Regardless,”_ Lavi heaved, exasperated, “of the fact you haven’t gotten laid in months, he is gorgeous, and generous - a la cocaine on Christmas - and, most importantly, you’re lucky to be off fucking someone who actually thinks you’re funny. You, specifically, do _not_ come by those often.”

“Who says we’re fucking?” Allen defended, his lips taken with a delightfully amused grin, pointedly ignoring that comment on his humour.

In an undertone, Lavi commented, “Not his little sister, if that look on her face has anything to say about it.”

Allen shot a surreptitious glance to the kitchen, where Tyki had gotten sidetracked with handing Road the champagne bottle, and dashing away the dark purple lipstick which had been pressed to her chin from the push of her plump little lips against the heavy bottle. Road, rather than swatting him away, darted her head forwards and snapped her teeth, and cackled viciously when he flinched away, holding his hand out of reach with a deeply unimpressed look.

“She’s just teasing, right?” Allen reasoned, and Lavi scoffed a laugh.

“Pretending to,” he allowed scathingly, “sure. The look on her face while he was pouring the drinks was absolutely  _ vile.” _

“His  _ sister,  _ though,” Allen stressed, glancing between them and catching the similarities in their dark hair and curiously gold-brown eyes, slender hands and cutting smiles.

“No offence,” Lavi whispered, “but I think she called dibs.”

“Literally why would you say those words to me?” Allen demanded, looking down at Lavi with offended incredulity. 

Lavi gave a long, wide shrug and defended, “Don’t stab the messenger.”

“I hate you,” Allen said, and dangled the beer glass in front of Lavi. “Don’t ever speak to me again.”

“Can’t promise that,” he laughed, but took the drink nonetheless so Allen could saunter around the couch and seat himself on a cushion at the other side of the coffee table. “Sorry if this offends you,” Lavi called from the other side, “but I  _ am  _ getting down on your level,” he said, levering himself to slip off the couch and onto one of the dozen pillows scattered across the tile floor of the lounge. 

“I said don’t speak to me,” Allen reminded, scowling at Lavi from over the rim of his glass. 

It was then that David came back with a glass for himself and one for Jasdero, and with all of them sliding onto the floor around the coffee table, Jasdero called, “C’mon, stinky garbage man! Waitin’ on you!” 

Tyki responded with a huff and a roll of his eyes before stepping over and dipping to place his cup on the low table, and took his place right beside Allen without so much as a cursory glance for a more comfortable position.

Allen would think it more suspicious if he didn’t know exactly why he’d done it, thanks to the warm, sly grin that crept across Tyki’s face when he caught the way Allen’s brow quirked a little. 

While Tyki placed his phone flat on the table and shimmied some coke onto the smooth glass of the dark screen, Road slid into the spot Lavi and Jasdero had forsaken. Sat perched above them all on the sofa like a monarch or a god, one arm folded across her slim stomach and the other cradling the bottle of champagne to her shoulder, watching Tyki sit by Allen with a cold kind of intensity, legs crossed imperiously.

“You ever done cocaine, boy?” Tyki asked amongst the white noise chatter, his thigh pressed against Allen’s and his hands working quick with a debit card, cutting the powder into ivory lines with a dangerous, practiced ease. 

“What’s it like?” Allen let his question be his answer, eyes on Tyki’s dark forearms. 

He’d shed his jacket at some point, loosened his tie and rolled up his sleeves. His hair was still tied back smooth like silk, oil-black curls teasing the corner of his jaw and settling on his shoulders in a way that had Allen wanting to run his fingers through them. 

Just to see if they were as soft as they looked, as smooth and silken as they shone under the ugly fluorescent light. 

“It’s like,” Tyki hummed, lips pushing and pouting absentminded consideration while he thought as he worked. 

He tidied the lines, picked up the phone and placed it delicately in front of Allen. 

“It’s like waking up,” he settled on, grinning when he finally looked up to catch Allen’s stare. 

His eyes were beautiful, Allen realised all over again as he swallowed, heart beating almost nervously. A hundred shades of brown, dark around the edges with liquid sunlight scattered throughout, circling his iris. 

For all the cacophony around them, Allen had no trouble hearing Tyki when he hummed low and teasing, “Should I show you how?” 

Couldn’t help the way his lips curled into an answering smile like a flirtation and answered, “Please,” with a gesture for Tyki to take the lead.

From the wallet on the table, Tyki’s quick fingers rifled through ten or so notes. “Why do people smoke gold-leaf cigarettes, Allen?” he murmured, deep voice curling around Allen’s name in such a way as to make it  _ his.  _

“Because they can,” Allen answered, arching a brow. 

Tyki glanced up at that, smiled like Allen was the same as him and he knew it. “So why bother with singles?” he asked next, pulled a note from within the black leather. 

Allen watched his hands as he rolled it, quick and neat and easy. Lips sank into a smile when he saw the hundred embossed in the corner. 

“If you can afford it,” Allen smiled dark and suggestive like Lavi said he did best, let boldness and weed and the promise of  _ more  _ brush his hand across Tyki’s knee, trace up his thigh. “Then why not?” he murmured, fingers light against the seam of Tyki’s pants. 

The phone on the table in front of him lit up with a message and Allen laughed when he couldn’t help but read the text beneath the white lines of coke. 

“Would you two quit flirting and hoover some fucking lines already?” Road called from the other side of the table, phone in hand, almost quoting her message.

Tyki cocked a brow at Allen, grinned like  _ how about it?  _ and brought his hands to his face to follow through with at least half of her demand. “Straw,” he held up the note for Allen’s benefit, tucked the end against one nostril and let the rolled paper spool out. “Like this,” he murmured with a smile like a secret and pressed his thumb against his open nostril, ducked his head to pull the coke from the phone in front of Allen. 

It took half a second, and then he was straightening back up, line clean and the hundred in his hand. 

He blinked, pulled in a sharp breath through his nose and moved his lips in a little disgusted wiggle that Allen found  _ adorable  _ in his heavily blazed state. 

Tyki cleared his throat lightly and his fingers set to rolling the note once more. “Care to try?” he offered, shooting Allen a roguish grin - looking, for a moment, more like a carefree homeless man with all the time in the world than what Allen could only suppose was a wealthy business owner, always in a rush. 

“Didn’t look very tasty,” Allen laughed but let his fingers linger against Tyki’s palm when he accepted the money. Trailed his fingertips lightly up Tyki’s thigh before using that hand to cover his nose, bowed his head and tried his best.

“Tastes like gasoline,” Tyki grimaced slightly, nose wrinkling a little, “but there’s a reason people do it,” he shrugged, that grin coming back. Daring. Willing to see how far Allen would go. 

Wanting to push him a little bit further. 

Weed was all fine and good, but with a handsome man offering him a line of coke on Christmas, Allen thought he would be a fool to say no. 

There was nothing for a long moment but for the bitter taste slowly working its way down the back of his throat. 

Allen swallowed it down, sniffed tentatively around the realisation that snorting cocaine wasn’t as uncomfortable as he’d imagined. It almost went down easy. 

Almost.

Tyki smirked and dragged his finger across the glass screen, collected the grams Allen hadn’t managed to get. “You missed some,” he teased, stuck it in his mouth like sugar on his teeth, and only pulled his eyes away from Allen to pass the phone, bag and rolled note across to Lavi.

And then -  _ god. _

It was like waking up.

Lavi was arching a brow at Allen but the corner of his mouth twitched amusement in a smile that read  _ of course you would  _ and Allen could feel his heart beating in his chest, felt the way he was rubbing the wood grain of the table with absent fingers, felt the hair falling across his eyes, the foot he hadn’t realised he was tapping under the table. Too much going on. 

He breathed, tried to stop all that. 

Pulled his hands into his lap, stilled his foot. Reached up to tuck that strand of hair behind his ear before remembering he wasn’t meant to be moving his hands. Put them back on his lap and curled his toes in a vague kind of frustration when that lock of hair fell back across his face. 

Tyki’s hand was resting on the floor inches behind Allen - how had he not realised that? 

Well, he was realising it now. 

Realised it because Tyki had the fingers of his other hand pressed against his grinning lips, realised because Tyki turned his head away from those fingers to smother the faintest breath of a laugh. 

Realised  _ that  _ because his laugh brushed against Allen’s cheek and it made him feel his heartbeat all over again. 

Allen’s toes were curling and his fingers were twining and he only realised he was doing it when Tyki reached across to lay a steady hand over his. 

Tyki, who watched him with eyes almost too close, almost too gold. 

“How do you feel?” he asked, and it was like the haze from the weed and the alcohol and the exhaustion of the day and the month and the year had been lifted away from Allen’s ears and he could  _ hear  _ Tyki’s voice. The pitches and troughs, the nuances in his low, private tone. 

It was beautiful. Fuck, oh god, Tyki was beautiful. Allen was a wreck. 

Allen was a  _ wreck. _

It felt like being pushed to the edge of a precipice and realising he was too strong to fall. 

“I feel like I just woke up,” he smiled, honest and happy and  _ alive.  _

Tyki goddamn Mikk. What a man.

He leaned close, tilted his head so his lips were by Allen’s ear and his hair was tickling Allen’s cheek and surely he’d been out for hours already but he still smelled as fresh as a summer sun and Allen could  _ hear  _ the grin in his deep voice, could hear his fond amusement when he spoke low and close like a private showing. 

“Don’t take off just yet, Starboy,” was what he said, his hand slipping from atop Allen’s to trace across his knee. “I’d miss you,” he grinned, promised, brushed his fingers under Allen’s chin in a touch that made him want to melt, made him want to weave his hands into Tyki’s hair and press his lips up under his jaw in a thirsty, open-mouthed kiss. 

Allen turned his head until his lips were scraping over barely-there stubble and he was stifling the urge to shudder into the sensation. “Who's going to stop me?” he asked, low and quiet and almost a taunt, almost a threat. 

Almost the truth, Allen realised as he breathed in on an insurmountable urge to  _ do  _ something. 

Almost the truth. 

Who was going to stop him?

Tyki pulled back and his predator eyes were appraising Allen, testing him. Listening to him. He broke into a smile after a moment, those teasing lips pulled into a sly grin. 

“Not a single man,” Tyki murmured quietly, his eyes on Allen’s face, “if you didn’t want him to.”

Allen matched his grin, confident. “Impress me,” he teased, promised, “Tyki Mikk.” Taunted, because he already had. 

He already had, with those gold eyes and dark forearms and a smile that made Allen want to prove he could match it. 

Tyki had already won him over and over and over with the hand on his knee and the lips by his ear, his raw stubble and low voice. He’d won Allen’s smile and his attention, and his need to know more, but where was the fun in admitting it? 

If Tyki wanted him he’d have to earn it, and Allen was prepared to let him.

Lavi, it seemed, had palmed the baggie off to Road without cutting himself a line.

“I don’t want your dirty money,” she sniffed, picking up the note between two delicate black-painted nails. 

“It touched him,” Jasdero agreed, nodding emphatically, “so it’s definitely stinky.”

“He’s diseased, and doesn’t wash his clothes,” David agreed, and a short glance to Tyki’s exhausted expression told Allen all he needed to know.

But that overpowering desire to kiss him against the floor wasn’t helping either of their cases, so Allen made himself lick his dry lips and told himself not to think of elephants. 

“I once saw him,” Road enunciated while she cut her line, careful and considering, “stealing carp from a hotel pond.”

A glance at Lavi showed him  _ far  _ too self-satisfied, and Allen rolled his eyes when he actually jerked his thumb over his shoulder at her, as though making his point clear.

“He looks like a hobo,” David added simply, and Allen wondered how long these spiels usually went for.

“He  _ smells  _ like a hobo,” Jasdero agreed.

_“And!”_ Road finished triumphantly, “he can’t do simple math.”

“For fuck’s sake,” Tyki grimaced while he reached over to snatch the hundred off the table and tuck it back into his wallet. “It’s  _ Christmas _ you assholes,” he muttered and pulled a box of cigarettes from his pocket.

Held them up to Lavi like a question,and Lavi gestured to his bong with an easy shrug as answer. 

Tyki shrugged back, slotted one between his lips, and left Allen blinking mesmerised afterimages of him lighting up with a hand cupped around the warm yellow flame of the lighter he’d pinched from the table.

Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous. Beautiful. A sight Allen wanted to see, and wanted to see forever. Something he wanted a clear-cast memory of, so whenever he started doubting if the world could be pretty and something as terrible as Christmas could be good, he could pull out that image and this feeling and think that maybe it really was all in his head after all.

He could see everything, he could feel… _everything._ Every fiber of the cushion beneath him, every twist of his fingers so DESPERATE to do something. The texture of Tyki’s cheeks, shaded so handsomely with stubble. Allen could all but feel it beneath his fingertips, could feel Tyki’s hair in his hands, could taste his smoke on his tongue and all Allen wanted to do - god, all Allen really wanted to do was just TOUCH him. 

“I want,” Allen started, and then stopped, rolled his fingertips together to feel the subtle ridges and troughs of his fingerprints.

Everyone's eyes, he realised a moment later, were on him with an amused kind of expectation.

Initiation.

Newbie.

It was funny to them, watching Allen experience it for the first time.

It was funny to him, having them watch.

“I want to _clean,”_ he said, and only realised how true it was once the words had fallen from his lips.

Lavi snorted a long, low laugh and Jasdero and Road cackled. David shook his head with incredulous disbelief, and Tyki Mikk was stifling a laugh into his hand. 

“Go on, then,” Lavi encouraged, and Allen shook his head.

“No,” he refuted, a frown knitting his brows, “I don’t… I don’t want to  _ clean,  _ I just want…”

Well, he had absolutely no idea how to phrase this inexplicable desire to move, to  _ act.  _

“Wanna run a mile?” Road teased, leaning on her elbows over her knees.

“I probably could,” Allen allowed, “but I don’t think I  _ want  _ to, no.”

“Wanna take a shower?” David suggested. “You’ve been cuddling up to the garbage man, so you probably need it,” he reasoned, very reasonably indeed.

“Nooooooo,” Allen refuted, because the idea of having hundreds of millions of drops of water cascading across him was TERRIFYING and the thought of it was almost enough to make his skin ache.

“I think he means something with more adrenaline,” Road considered, and Jasdero perked up.

“Crawl across the balcony,” he suggested.

“NO!” was the resounding cry from Road, Lavi and Tyki, immediate and fervent.

“No I like that idea,” David said, and Allen nodded consideringly.

“That does sound closer to the mark,” he agreed.

“Okay,” Lavi allowed slowly, “so. Considering climbing over the balcony is out, what kind of wild adrenaline thrill are you chasing?”

“Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm,” Allen hummed, long and dragged out, eyes flicking too quick over their faces, around the room. “I want.”

He paused.

Blinked.

“I wanna go outside.”

Jasdevie and Road all seemed to find that incomparably boring. There was a collective sound of dissatisfaction from the three of them, but Lavi had Allen pinned with a confusing sort of look, and Tyki seemed all too interested in Lavi’s response.

“It’s sleeting outside,” Lavi said, as though Allen didn’t know.

“It’s not so bad.”

“Are you sure you should go?”

“Just to the gas station,” Allen bargained, and Lavi twisted his lips as though he were on the cusp of agreeing. “I won’t be long,” he reassured, already pushing himself to stand. “I just want to walk.”

“I don’t think you should go alone,” seemed to be Lavi’s last hangup.

Allen glanced down, between Lavi and Tyki, the two of them watching him with veiled concern and keen interest respectively, and an amused smirk twisted his lips.

“Either you leave strangers unattended in your house, or you trust a stranger to bring me home safe,” he reasoned. 

“It’s your house too, you know,” he grumbled, but leaned back against the foot of the sofa with a huff. “You can go alone if you like.”

“I keep myself terrible company,” he smiled, already moving towards the door, “but I have a lot to say about the weather.”

The door was swinging home behind him, and he wasn’t surprised when someone caught it at the last moment and pushed through to jog a few steps and catch up with him.

“I figured you’re more valuable than our shit,” Lavi sighed, slowing to match Allen’s steps. “And I also figured you’d want this,” he added, wry, and flicked up the umbrella in his hand. 

“Thoughtful,” Allen smiled, and asked, “Did you bring keys?”

Lavi’s steps faltered for a beat before he picked up his feet with the too-cheery announcement of, “Nah, but they’ll probably let us back in.”

Allen arched a brow, remembering exactly how that mentality had seemed to work for Tyki. “You sure about that?”

“Absolutely not one tiny little bit.”

Allen let loose an easy laugh, and the two of them walked in familiar silence down the hall. 

The elevator ran slower and creakier in the winter, and they didn’t quite trust the cables. What with Allen’s newfound energy, it was a far better idea to take the stairs. 

Echoes bouncing round and round in circles over their heads, Lavi huffed breathless laughs while he rushed to keep up with Allen’s energetic trot. 

“Maybe I  _ should  _ have sent Tyki with you,” he gasped when they reached the ground floor, and Allen wasn’t sure why it felt quite so easy to laugh right then.

“Maybe you should have,” he teased, and wrenched open the door, dashed through the foyer to the main entrance. 

“DON’T GO OUT YET!” Lavi cried after him, laughing too hard, and dashed to catch up even as he fumbled with the umbrella.

“Bad luck, to open an umbrella inside,” Allen threatened, and stepped outside.

It was bitterly cold, and he probably should have gotten gloves and another jacket and maybe even a scarf, and he  _ definitely  _ should have waited for Lavi to get the umbrella. 

“Bad luck to walk out in the rain in the middle of WINTER,” Lavi countered sharply, and stepped out to give Allen whatever shelter their old umbrella offered. 

Hunkered together, Allen’s damp shoulders already hunched and his hands already folded into his armpits, they got all of two steps before they were stopped by a shrill whistle. 

“OI!” David’s iconic voice called down from on high. 

Skeptical, Lavi tilted the brim of the umbrella back and the two of them peered up the three stories to their own balcony. 

“CAN YOU GET SOME COLA?”

“YEAH?” Lavi called back, confusion lacing his voice.

“SWEET,” David agreed, and disappeared from the balcony. 

“Gonna drink it all before we get back, though,” Lavi mumbled to Allen, who snorted a laugh against his freezing collarbones. “What’s it about the weather, though?” he prompted as the set off again, shoulders bumping and shoes flicking drops of slushy water from their toes. 

Allen sucked in a deep, shuddering breath and held his jaw clenched against the cold for a long while. 

“Cross likes the rain,” was what he ended up saying. “It makes him melancholy, in a good kind of way. So I think, by all rights, I should hate it.”

“I think this hardly counts as rain,” Lavi muttered, and kicked his heel through a gross brown puddle. 

Voice quiet - quiet enough as to almost be lost beneath the sound of the freezing rain and their footsteps on the wet pavement, he said, “Mana hated it, though.”

Lavi didn’t say anything, and Allen wondered if it was nerves or cocaine that powered his too-fast steps. 

“Nowhere was dry,” he said, because for once, finally, it felt right to say, “and it was always cold. So he’d tuck all his coats around me, put me up on his lap, you know? Sometimes,” he laughed - _laughed,_ he ducked his head on a breathless, happy laugh. “Sometimes he’d pull his sweaters over my head too, and we’d stay warm like that - or, I would,” he amended, the smile turning a little sad, drying up on the corners of his lips. “I’d be out of the rain, and he’d - he’d take what we couldn’t hide from, I suppose.”

They lapsed, for a long moment. Allen lurched every now and then to land his foot in a puddle with a bitterly cold splash, and Lavi took to hooking their arms together so he wouldn’t get too far out from the cover of the umbrella. 

“Is it a good memory?” Lavi asked at length.

“Bittersweet, I think,” Allen reasoned with a shrug. “It feels good to remember sharing the rain like that, but everything from back then is a little bit sad.”

“That makes sense,” Lavi nodded, and Allen wondered if he knew nearly as much about Mana as Allen assumed he did. Allen rarely spoke of him, of course, and thought about him as little as possible, and he wondered if he’d told Lavi more than five thing about him in all the years they’d been friends. 

“Good walk?” Lavi asked, the gas station in view.

“Good walk,” Allen agred, skipping over the gutter to cross the empty road. 

“Good day?” Lavi laughed, pulled along behind him.

“Good day,” Allen agreed, letting his elbow slip from Lavi’s to catch his hand and drag him beneath the cover of the fuel pumps, only caught in half a second of freezing rain.

“Goooooood... night?” he teased, stumbling after Allen and dropping the umbrella by the door.

“Yeeees,” Allen agreed in the same tone, leaning in against his shoulder with a laughing smile. “But it’s not over yet,” he reminded, and fell away from Lavi like a swinging pendulum, lifted their joined hands and swung under them. 

“You got a game plan?” Lavi asked, letting Allen go with a grin and a gentle push towards the fridges. 

“Mmmmmmm,” he dragged out, catching himself on the glass and leaning right in to press his forehead against the door. “Thought I’d just try kissing him and see how I go.”

“That is a  _ terrible  _ plan.”

“Whyyyyyyyy,” he groaned, swinging open too heavily on the door, “does everything have to be complicated?”

“Because  _ people,”  _ Lavi stressed, plucking out a large bottle of Coke, “are complicated.”

“People are  _ fine,”  _ Allen heaved on a loud sigh. “YOU are complicated. Tyki Mikk is wonderfully normal.”

“Tyki Mikk,” Lavi laughed, “met us as a hobo, saved your life on a bad day, and turned up on Christmas in a black tie with a five-thousand-dollar fucking Yves Saint Laurent coat.”

Allen paused so hard he thought his heart might have stopped beating altogether.

_ “No.” _

“Yeah,” Lavi nodded, eyebrows arched, eye wide in his desperate bid to convey how damn serious he was.

Allen turned on his heel, took two steps, then turned again. “... _ No.” _

_ “Yeah,”  _ Lavi enunciated, eyebrows lifting higher.

“Nope,” Allen shook his head. “No, I know this game. Absolutely not.”

“Absolutely for once in my goddamn life I am not shitting you,” Lavi announced. “That was - and I’m not fucking kidding - a Chesterfield grain de poudre. Velvet collar, peaked lapels-”

“Why do you KNOW that?” Allen demanded, his chest pained in a physical way from just how fucking obscene Lavi’s words were.

“It is my life fucking DREAM to own that coat,” Lavi said. After a moment he amended, “Well. Not that one  _ specifically,  _ but Saint Laurent is on my goddamn bucket list.”

“Nope,” Allen announced, turning back on his heel and striding towards the counter, “noooo I am  _ not  _ doing this.”

“Why don’t you believe me?” Lavi demanded, trotting after him with the Coke in his hand.

“I  _ do,”  _ Allen whined and slapped his wallet onto the counter, “but if I think about it too hard I’m gonna wet myself.”

“Merry Christmas,” Lavi cheered over Allen’s shoulder, grinning too damn wide at the cashier.

“Festivus,” Allen corrected, “for the rest ‘v us.”

“Stop,” Lavi commanded, and Allen nodded somber agreement and paid for their cola.

“Do we need anything else?” Lavi prompted, whirling around to scan the shop. “Raspberry licorice?”

“If you want,” Allen shrugged. “I’m not super hungry.”

_“Not-”_ Lavi started, appalled, and twisted to pin Allen with an affronted look, before seeming to remember that they'd done drugs and drugs were bad and they messed with appetite, amongst other things. “Alright,” he allowed with a vague shrug, “yeah. There’s still stuff around the house if you need it.”

“Merry Christmas,” Allen said to the cashier when he stepped away from the counter, cola in hand.

“I already said that,” Lavi reminded.

Allen shit him a look. _“Did_ you?”

“Yes,” he stressed, bland and surprised, as though he couldn't imagine how Allen could question such an inalienable truth. “Yes, I did. And you brought up fucking Festivus.”

“I think,” Allen considered as they stepped back outside, the cold biting too quickly through their damp, unwary clothes, “sometimes you just hear what you want to hear.”

Lavi opened his mouth and sucked in a breath while he righted the umbrella over their heads, before letting it all go with a sigh. “Alright,” he allowed, “okay.”

* * *

 

Between the two of them, they did manage to drink  _ most  _ of the cola on the walk home. There was a good couple of mouthfuls left, and it was probably mostly their collective backwash, and that was honestly better than coming home with a completely empty bottle. 

David was  _ not  _ amused, and expressed that clearly by throwing the almost-empty bottle at Tyki.

“Fuck  _ off,”  _ was the churlish response, followed closely by Tyki grabbing the neck of the plastic bottle and smacking David over the back of the head with it. 

An unobtrusive drive-by on the fine wool coat Tyki had left folded over the bench told him yes, it  _ was  _ Yves Saint Laurent, and between the weather and the puddles and half a bottle of coke, Allen decided he should probably go to the toilet before he really did wet himself, because Tyki Mikk’s coat was fucking absurd and the  _ one time  _ Lavi had to be telling the truth couldn’t have been about dogs learning gravity, or fucking… fanny nappy pins. 

Walking past the sofa, where Lavi had graciously re-deposited himself immediately upon arrival, Allen gently grabbed a fistful of his hair from the top of his head and tilted him back to look up.

“I hate you,” he said first, scowling down at Lavi while the others bickered like children, “and I’m going to the toilet.”

_ “Really?”  _ he remarked, thrilled.

“Shut up,” Allen snapped, and shoved his head forwards once more before turning primly on his heel and heading straight for the bathroom.

It was afterwards, washing his hands with the muffled sound of the familial sound of hardly-good-natured-but-still-thoroughly-enjoyable arguing filtering through the closed door, that Allen found himself looking in the mirror. 

Looking in the mirror, he’d found once with marijuana, was usually a one-way ticket down the twisting alleys of his mind. 

Mostly he’d been too terrified of the depth his own thoughts had taken him to try again, but part of him was still buzzing with the remains of cocaine, and he wondered if that made it any different to weed. 

So he was washing his hands, and he was looking in the mirror, and he was listening to the rambunctious entertainment bubbling just beyond the door of his own small universe, and he was wondering which can of worms his thoughts would open tonight. 

It was in wondering that, and in listening to the funmaking, that Allen realised quite pervasively that it was  _ Christmas.  _

It was Christmas, and it was raining, and he’d  _ talked about Mana,  _ and it hadn’t even felt bad. It hadn’t felt bad. It  _ didn’t  _ feel bad. In fact, it felt  _ great.  _ It felt bouying and exciting and  _ warm  _ and… and happy. 

He felt happy.

Looking in the mirror, the remains of his first hit of cocaine thrumming like electricity in his fingertips, Allen thought that this was probably what normal people felt like every day. Just…  _ good,  _ with no strings attached. No reason, no… lingering feelings of discomfort, even when they  _ were  _ just feeling good.

Just truly, beautifully  _ happy. _

It wasn’t a bitter thought so much as a satisfied realisation. Relieved. 

He knew what he was missing out on, now. He’d experienced it, and it was beautiful, and people like him didn’t really get the chance to see that at all.

He felt lucky. 

He felt… 

But before he could realise what, exactly, he felt - before he could fall too far down the rabbit hole of his thoughts and his own reflection, the bathroom door opened for a bare moment and Tyki Mikk slipped in, entered stage left from the crescendo of sound that Lavi must have been orchestrating in the main room. 

Allen had been washing his hands for almost a whole minute, he realised. Or maybe longer.

Tyki, with his smile and his beautifully reassuring presence, placed a glass of wine on the counter by Allen’s hip and rested his hand there. 

“Miss me?” Allen guessed with a taunt in his smile, watching Tyki through the mirror. 

“Like you wouldn’t believe,” he returned with an answering grin, his other hand coming to grasp the edge of the sink to hem Allen in. “Christmas must be a terrible time to have a birthday,” he murmured as though he didn’t know it himself, rested his chin on Allen’s shoulder and watched him in the mirror. 

Allen took a moment to thrill at the warmth of Tyki’s body so close against his, and he realised this was the first time they’d properly touched in more than careful brushes of fingers, hands creeping like smoke up thighs. 

Tyki’s pupils were blown wide from the night and the drugs and Allen noticed it because he loved them. He loved Tyki’s eyes, all brown and gold and every shade of foolish promise.

“It’s not so bad,” he said, shutting off the faucet. “There’s always a party,” he reasoned, lips twitching. Allen dropped his eyes away from the mirror and turned his head so his cheek pressed against Tyki’s hair, his lips brushing Tyki’s brow as he spoke. 

“Pass me a hand towel?” he asked, wet hands resting on the tap.

“Half the presents though,” Tyki countered with a small smile like he knew something. Like he wanted something. 

He stood back a moment to pull a towel from the rack. 

Allen laughed quietly and turned, picked up the glass by his elbow and exchanged it with Tyki when he returned. He smiled, kept his eyes on Tyki’s while he wiped his hands carefully. “Somehow,” he considered, chin tilted up so he could meet Tyki’s gaze, “I make due.”

“That, you certainly do,” Tyki agreed and Allen pulled in a quiet breath when Tyki’s heavy eyes dropped from his face to skate down his body in quiet appreciation, a slow smile forming on his lips. 

“How about,” he hummed, gaze caught somewhere around Allen’s collarbone, “we go another line,” he started, one hand back to resting against the edge of the sink with the glass while the other trailed up Allen’s chest to pull his collar open, “and I give you a birthday present too?” he offered, head dipping to press the most gentle kiss against the pulse Allen could feel trembling in his veins. “You’re probably feeling the last of your first one.”

“What’re the lines for?” Allen laughed a little, eyes locked on the way Tyki’s skewed tie hung loose from his neck. Brought his hand up and twisted it around his fingers. 

He could feel Tyki’s grin against his throat, shuddered at the coarse touch of his faint stubble when he spoke against Allen’s skin. “Never heard of a White Christmas?” he teased, tongue darting out to brush faint and teasing against Allen’s neck.

Allen’s hand tightened around Tyki’s tie and he tugged lightly, pulled him up from his neck so Allen could see those gorgeous, dangerous eyes of his. “Would you like to kiss me, Tyki?” he asked, breathed into the space between them.

Tyki’s eyes narrowed with his smile and he murmured, cocky and the slightest bit reverent, “Name a single person in this house who doesn’t.”

Allen’s lips twitched in an amused smile. A silver tongue to match his gold eyes, and Allen could feel himself falling and falling and falling for it.

“You seem like a man,” Allen murmured, eyes dropping to Tyki’s grinning lips, “who likes being  _ first.”  _

“And you,” Tyki responded, hand trailing up Allen’s neck to curl into his hair, “seem like someone,” he breathed, inclined his head closer, lips brushing temptation against Allen’s, “who likes  _ winning.”  _

Allen’s eyes fluttered closed on a quiet sigh when Tyki’s hand tightened in his hair, tilted his head back so Tyki could look down at him with the expression of a man who knew he’d already won. 

“So, boy,” he teased, and Allen opened his eyes just to see that grin. “Are you feeling lucky?”

Allen’s lips twitched in a smile, eyes heavy and sly when he asked, “What’s luck got to do with it?” 

Tyki’s eyes closed when he laughed, deep and rich and full of fun, and Allen used the tie wound around his hand to pull him down until those grinning lips were pressed against his in a kiss that was all at once soft and sharp and full of humour.

Dangerous, almost. Tyki was dangerous. 

Allen knew it in the way his laugh was a taunt, in the way his eyes narrowed when he smiled, and in his promise to give Allen just what they both wanted. 

Tyki’s eyes were gold and his tongue was silver and his lips were a hundred times sweeter than cocaine, a thousand times  _ better _ . Mouth working slow against Allen’s, teeth tugging his lip when he pulled away - too soon, they both decided, and met in the middle for more. 

Allen’s fingers in Tyki’s hair, where he’d wanted them all night. Soft like silk, thick and full and curling around Allen’s hands while vermeil lips sucked and bit at him, fine silver tongue stroked into his mouth. Soft and insistent and lax enough to play with, gentle enough for Allen to sigh a groan into when he returned the tease, melted into how  _ soft  _ Tyki was in places people couldn’t see, in places Allen could only  _ feel.  _

Even when that tongue caressed behind Allen’s teeth, made his throat tighten in a moan and his fingers clench in Tyki’s hair, he was still so soft - so gentle and coaxing and Allen was drunk on how it  _ felt,  _ intoxicated by how much he wanted that tongue gilding his skin.

Tyki pulled back, sounded as breathless as Allen felt when he murmured, rushed and drunk against Allen’s lips, “I’m going to cut you a line.” His mouth fumbled against Allen’s, his hand tightened in Allen’s hair before trailing out too gentle, too soft, to cup his cheek in a gesture almost  _ adoring _ . “And then I’m going to suck your dick,” he continued, body hot where he pressed Allen against the sink, “and if there’s a damn thing you don’t like about it,” he growled, lips skating across Allen’s cheek so his teeth could catch on his ear, “then you’re going to  _ tell  _ me how to make you love me.”

“I think I already do,” Allen grinned, breathless and close-eyed and just about ready to fall for this self-assured man and his too-soft tongue, more addictive than any drug. 

Tyki groaned something like a curse beneath Allen’s ear and pressed the glass he held into Allen’s hand. “Have this,” he said, and only pulled away once he no longer had an excuse to keep Allen warm and close against the sink. 

Hands dropped to Allen’s waist for the apparent purpose of moving him away from the sink, but the look in Tyki’s eyes and the smile on his lips read heady attraction and hunger just the same as those hands did when they trailed up Allen’s sides, high and higher. Shirt bunching up, Allen was mindful of the glass hanging from his fingers when he lifted his arms to pull them from the sleeves, laughing a little once Tyki had it off him. 

Tyki pulled in a breath like a deeply satisfied sigh and smiled, dark and sly. “Like unwrapping a present,” he teased, lowered his head to Allen’s level once more to nip kisses along his jaw.

“You keep promising lines,” Allen breathed, laughing between paired lips and kisses growing messier for the way Tyki’s hands were dragging arousal across Allen’s skin like a forest fire, “but I don’t see any getting racked.” He grinned against Tyki’s lips, shivered and arched into him when his hot fingers traced up Allen’s still-chilled spine. “I might start thinking you’re all talk,” he teased into Tyki’s laugh, tilted his head back when Tyki’s smooth lips moved sweet like seduction against his throat. 

“Can you blame me for being distracted,” Tyki murmured, voice painted with equal parts humour and arousal, “when you’re the one causing it?” 

The short stubble around his lips scraped Allen’s jaw, tickled in a way that made him laugh and twist his fingers in Tyki’s hair. His mouth moved lower, gentle hands brushing slowly over Allen’s back. He giggled, pressed the back of his hand against his mouth to stifle the laughter that Tyki’s stubbly cheeks tickled out of him. 

And then - _god,_ and then his chin brushing like an accident over Allen’s nipple and he arched and shuddered in Tyki’s hands, had to bite back a moan because _fuck_ that had _never felt so_ _good_. 

Nor had Allen had ever been knocked breathless by the immediacy of an erection, but whatever happened next came close, his dick fully hard by the time Tyki closed his lips around the peaked bud of his oversensitive nipple and  _ sucked.  _

Allen whined when Tyki pulled away, hips instinctively grinding forwards against his thigh. “Easy,” Tyki murmured against Allen’s ear, the hands that slipped down to grip Allen’s ass making him want to do  _ anything  _ but go easy. “If I don’t cut these lines now, we’re never going to get to it,” he reasoned against Allen’s neck, kneading his fingers. “It’s better,” he breathed, murmured, words heated like a promise. “It’s so much better.” 

He pulled away from Allen’s throat and smiled, rolled their hips together long and slow, brought his words to the corner of Allen’s mouth in something like a kiss. 

“Do you trust me?” 

He had to laugh, because what kind of question was that? 

“Of course not,” he answered simply, drunken laughter spilling from his lips when he repeated, “Of course I don’t. I don’t even know you, Mikk.”

“You know my name,” Tyki grinned, sharp. Wanting. Hungry. “That’ll do for now.” Anticipation. He was full of a dark expectation that Allen wanted to let himself  _ drown  _ in. 

Tyki’s hands were steady with uppers and practiced ease, and it took half a minute for him to cut lines on the edge of the bathroom sink, even with Allen pressed close behind him, arms curled around his waist and lips behind his ear, whispering words designed only to have him lose his focus. 

A hundred from his pocket, and he graciously passed it to Allen for the first line. A hand sitting low on his bare back, thumb tracing fire against his skin. A kiss pressed hot and lingering to Allen’s temple and the world was spinning, the world was spinning and he was on fire but he couldn’t feel a thing. 

God… god, he didn’t know _what_ he felt. Too much and not enough and every breath of it overwhelming. Tyki’s hands were on him, on him, _on him,_ and in the space between one blink and the next Tyki had snorted his own line him pinned against the sink. Demanding hands and hungry lips, and Allen couldn’t breathe between his kisses, couldn’t get enough of them. 

“I need you,” he gasped, words tumbling from his tongue without a thought, his body arched in excruciating bliss against Tyki’s. “I need you,” he pleaded, “I want you, I need you.”

“Promised you, didn’t I?” Tyki taunted, teased, breathed just as fervent against his throat. “It’s so much better.”

“You promised something else, too,” Allen countered, hips tilting to press against Tyki’s. 

“You don’t let me get away with words I don’t mean,” Tyki commented, amused and enamoured, “do you?” 

His hands traced around the waist of Allen’s pants to thumb open his fly, any pretense of delicacy abandoned for the skin-deep, bone-deep sensations rolling helpless pleasure through Allen’s poor desperate body.

And when he fell to his knees -  _ god,  _ he fell to his knees like subjugation, like penance, like he wanted to show Allen what it meant to be devout.

There was nothing to be said of the fact Allen hadn’t been fucked in months, because anything that might have been said about anyone who had ever given him a blowjob in all his life could be immediately and thoroughly forgotten in light of how it felt to be given two lines of cocaine and then have his dick sucked by a man who’d left his five thousand dollar Yves Saint Laurent coat on the island bench in Allen’s shitty apartment like it wasn’t worth more than every single thing  _ in  _ that apartment, collectively. 

That sure was something else.

And Tyki? Tyki sucked dick like he was starving for it. Like it was a delicacy his money  _ couldn’t  _ buy. 

That was a fucking lie and he knew it as well as Allen did, but with a mouth like that Allen had the idea that Tyki didn’t really  _ need  _ to pay for it. With a face like that and a voice like that and a smile like that and a  _ mouth  _ like that. 

Lips plush and spit-slicked moved down Allen’s cock like he didn’t know how to gag, the flat of his tongue rolling along the underside of his length like he couldn’t get enough of the musky taste. Eyes closed like he  _ loved  _ it. Eyes closed until he wanted to steal what was left of Allen’s breath with a look all black and gold, pupils blown on arousal and the rush of ivory pumping through his veins. 

The sight of him working Allen’s dick like he did it for cash was almost as good as how it felt - _almost._

When his lips hollowed and he  _ sucked,  _ Allen couldn’t help the way his eyes slammed shut, the way his mouth fell open in a gasp. Couldn’t help the short moan that echoed around them in the bathroom.

The cocaine in his blood, in his ears, it clung to that. It clung to the  _ sound -  _ the sound of Tyki’s mouth moving on Allen’s cock all slick and -  _ fuck,  _ when his lips parted. So obscene in the way the smack of spit and skin on skin echoed against the tiles, echoed in Allen’s ears. 

Tyki’s tongue dragged sinful and teasing across the head of Allen’s cock, and both their breaths were coming heavy and almost too loud. 

The curse that fell from Allen’s lips hardly sounded like his own, his voice hardly sounded familiar. Somehow weaker, somehow deeper than he expected. Groaning and resounding in his ears and melding into Tyki’s wordless response, melting into the way Tyki moaned hot and low and muffled with his mouth full of Allen’s cock. 

Sucking and bobbing his head like he wanted more and more and  _ more,  _ and he kept going lower and lower, deeper, until Allen’s voice wasn’t low so much as too high. The head of his hard dick against the back of Tyki’s throat, Tyki’s lips tight suction around the base of his erection, Tyki’s too-soft tongue  _ playing  _ with him, and every breath that passed Allen’s lips was a sobbing gasp. 

Room spinning with champagne and cocaine, Allen swore he found heaven in Tyki’s mouth. In the bathroom of his shitty apartment, on Christmas, on what could have been his twenty-first birthday, Allen thought he might have found something to fall in love with. 

He thrust into the hand Tyki curled around his spit-slicked length, lips still tight around the head, too-soft tongue still driving pleasure like a thousand fucking orgasms up his spine. 

His fingers twisted into Tyki’s hair while he gasped hot and breathless at the way he bobbed his head to meet every motion. His tongue worked incessantly at Allen’s slit and he could feel it, he could  _ feel  _ it, he could _ feel himself coming,  _ and it wasn't usually this good it wasn't usually this strong it wasn't usually this rush of inescapable pleasure so overwhelming that he was  _ drowning  _ in it. 

He was about to come he was about to come, “I’m about to-” he sobbed, breathless, felt his pounding heart beat impossibly faster when he heard someone dragging their knuckles along the wall outside the bathroom. 

Gut-wrenching intuition and an inescapable rush of arousal told him they were going to come in, and half a second later -holy fuck, holy  _ fuck _ they were coming in. 

The door was pushing open and and they were going to see they were going to see Allen with his dick in Tyki’s mouth and there wasn't a single person in the apartment who he _wanted_ to live through that but Road was probably the worst possibility and right as she opened the door Tyki _sucked,_ loud and wet and _too much_ and Allen was coming at the same time as Tyki whipped his head away to sneer at whoever had opened the door, and it was Road oh fuck it was _Road_ and her wide eyes were right on Allen’s dick in Tyki's hand and he was _filthy_ because he still closed his eyes and _enjoyed_ it, fucked out and drowned in pleasure while his fingers curled tight and tighter in Tyki’s hair. 

Savage possessiveness coursed through his veins like fire and he watched blearily through slitted eyes at his cum streaked on Tyki’s surprised face, and seeing it only served to drag another wave of mind-numbing pleasure out of him. His hand clutched the edge of the sink while his body trembled and his heart pounded with a savage pride slowly being painted with something like mortification.

“Um,” Road stated, voice cutting like ice, “what the fuck?”

Allen, still mostly aroused, blearily realised that the only reason Tyki hadn’t swallowed was because he’d missed his chance. 

With that thought, he almost wished he could go again. 

Tyki glanced back at his still-hard dick, and the second scowl he shot his sister was markedly more furious than the first. 

“What the  _ fuck,”  _ he spat back at her, seething and still on his knees, still with Allen’s come on his face. 

Oh fuck, oh god. His sister, his  _ fucking sister, oh god.  _ Allen’s cheeks flooded with embarrassment and a stomach-dropping rush of fear, hands limp on the edge of the sink and in Tyki’s hair, eyes wide with mortification.

_ “Dibs,”  _ Road glared icily, levelling a condemning finger at Allen from across the room. 

Oh fuck oh god why was Lavi right about  _ everything?  _ Was he dreaming? Was he tripping? She’d just walked in on Allen coming all over her brother’s face so  _ why was he the only one freaking out? _

“Nobody fucking cares,” Tyki sneered, dragged his thumb across his cheek. “I’m not respecting  _ dibs  _ when he’s feeling me up under the table,” he reasoned scathingly, licked the come off his hand like it was a fucking declaration of war. 

_ “Oh my god,”  _ Allen breathed, breaking out of his stupor to tuck his dick back in his boxers and zip his fly, wishing he couldn’t still feel Tyki’s tongue on his cock and stubble on his navel because it was  _ very  _ distracting and his common sense was kicking back in and it told him that getting hard again was exactly  _ not  _ what he wanted.

“Oh my  _ god,”  _ he repeated, kind of feeling himself ascend as the reality of the situation set in. Oh  _ god  _ oh fuck Road had walked in and - she’d  _ seen,  _ yeah, but - oh fuck, Allen had - he’d  _ come  _ because someone had fucking-

Oh god oh god oh  _ fucking god  _ how much had he  _ liked  _ that? The pit of Allen’s stomach had dropped through the seven rings of hell and he actually - no, he. He couldn’t face this, he had to turn - turn away, hand covering his mouth in gut-wrenching mortification. 

Oh  _ god. _

There was a quiet sound like a sigh and Allen felt Tyki stand, felt Tyki’s hands on his hips and kind of wanted to sink into the floor in a puddle of shame. “Why are you still here?” Tyki asked, scathing, to the response of Road’s vocal sneer and the door pulling closed with more than a touch too much force. 

Tyki’s hand was smoothing up Allen’s side, curling around his stomach in a one-armed embrace while he rested his chin on Allen’s bare shoulder. “You alright?” he asked, reaching for the hand towel Allen had left on the edge of the sink and using it to wipe off his own cheek.

“Your sister just walked in on us and I came on your face,” Allen recounted, as though Tyki hadn’t been there for the whole thing.

He laughed, low and quiet where Allen could feel it thrumming against his back. “Yeah,” he murmured and pressed his grinning lips to Allen’s shoulder. “She’s livid.”

Allen groaned and opened his eyes to see his reflection - cheeks red, Tyki smirking over his shoulder. “Why is she  _ livid?” _ he asked, still breathless and very confused, heart still pounding to palpitations in his chest. 

“She wanted to fuck you,” Tyki laughed again, his chest against Allen’s back and his hand trailing over his stomach like he loved how it felt to touch Allen’s body.

Allen groaned weakly, and caught Tyki’s hand to stop the distracting gesture so he could say, “I don’t even care that it was a bet.” He caught Tyki’s eyes in the mirror and gave a breathless, embarrassed, conflicted laugh before admitting, “That was still the best blow job I’ve ever had.”

“It wasn’t a bet,” Tyki stated, pulled away a little so he could turn Allen around in the cage of his arms. “She’ll make my life hell,” he admitted and Allen had to tilt his head back to meet his grinning eyes, “but I  _ really wanted  _ to suck your cock.”

“No offence,” Allen murmured, lifting his hand to wipe a spot of come from the corner of Tyki’s mouth, “but I’m  _ really glad  _ you did.”

“Maybe you could return the favour one day,” he teased and ducked his head to kiss Allen with those gorgeous fucking talented fucking lips of his. 

Allen grinned against him, could still feel the tingle of stubble between his thighs when it scraped across his lips in breathless friction. Hands at Tyki’s back, reaching under his shirt, along the smooth planes of his well-built body. 

Lips skated across Tyki’s rough cheek, and he tilted his head to bite at his earlobe. Realised it was  _ pierced  _ because this was Tyki, this was Tyki fucking Mikk and he had pierced ears and sucked cock like he was fucking  _ made  _ for it and Allen was drunk and high and all kinds of turned on because, despite Road, coming on Tyki’s face was definitely the hottest thing Allen had ever experienced - and he didn’t want to stop, wanted to keep going and  _ keep going,  _ so he trailed his hands around the waistband to the front of Tyki’s pants, murmured, “Why not right now?” because he  _ really wanted to.  _

“That’s-” Tyki started to say, cut off in a breathless groan when Allen grinned against his neck, cupped his hand over Tyki’s crotch and massaged his hand around - uh. Nothing. 

Well,  _ something  _ but not, like. A  _ hard  _ something. 

“That,” Tyki repeated and laughed abashedly, “is very embarrassing.”

“Says you,” Allen muttered, scowling down between them. “What happened?” he asked, moving his hand again experimentally.

Tyki bit off a sound, his hips pressing into the touch a little while he groaned against Allen’s neck, “A mixture of alcohol and Road.”

“Frustrating,” Allen growled, moving the heel of his palm over the shape of Tyki’s dick, trying to massage some kind of response out of him. “I was just thinking I could stand to get hard again,” he pouted, unwilling to give up.

_ “That’s,”  _ Tyki gasped, catching Allen’s wrist and pressing forward, “cruel,” he settled on, sounding just as regretful as Allen felt and somehow more frustrated. “It’s not going anywhere for several hours and I’m already losing my mind.”

His other arm was curled around Allen’s back and his face was buried in Allen’s neck, breath hot on his skin. Catching on, Allen grinned and teased, “What, upset you can’t fuck me?” and laughed when Tyki groaned into his neck.

“Upset doesn’t come close,” Tyki breathed and seemed to steel his will. Pulled himself straight and rolled his eyes at his own weakness before he ducked back down to kiss Allen’s grinning face.

Tilting his head up, Allen gave up on Tyki’s dick and let himself enjoy his wonderful mouth. 

Hands cupping the back of Tyki’s head, fingers curling into his hair, Allen sucked Tyki’s soft tongue between their slow-moving lips. Tyki’s arms curled around his back and slipped low over the swell of his ass until Tyki was lifting him. Legs curled around Tyki’s waist, Allen groaned into their kiss and tightened his hands in Tyki’s hair, pulled him right between his legs once Tyki had set him down on the edge of the sink. 

_ “God,  _ I wanna fuck you,” Tyki growled, tearing his lips away to suck at Allen’s neck while his hands dragged up his thighs. “I swear I’ll kill her,” he gritted and bit at Allen’s collarbone.

“Unless you wanna start pushing rope,” Allen warned, gasping, “better not say things like that.”

“Can’t stop  _ kissing  _ you,” Tyki breathed, trailed his lips back to Allen’s while his fingers traced up Allen’s back, gliding warm over his sensitive skin.

“I definitely,” Allen gasped, “want to feel you all over my body.”

“Clearly the bathroom isn’t the place for it,” Tyki laughed against his grinning mouth, and sucked Allen’s lower lip between his teeth. 

Allen arched against him, head tilted bare his throat for Tyki’s biting lips, laughed, his voice gone all breathless and thrilled, “How subtle will it be, do you think? The two of us going to my room?”

Tyki’s laugh was gorgeously low, entranced and so wonderfully amused. “I don’t think subtlety is our problem right now,” he reasoned, and Allen dragged his hands up the back of Tyki’s neck to weave into his silken hair, indulgent and luxurious. 

A fist rapped sharp against the door, and Allen’s legs curled instinctively around Tyki, arms wrapped around his shoulders to hold him close and close and close while he breathed a startled, embarrassed laugh against his hot neck. 

“Are you done having sex yet?” Lavi’s voice rang out, hardly muffled through the door. “There’s only one toilet, you know.”

“Go next door!” Allen commanded, dragging his fingers through Tyki’s hair just to feel the heavy distraction of it. 

Jasdero was the one who answered, faded voice calling, “We don’t have a key,” from what Allen could assume was the kitchen. 

Allen dropped his head to Tyki’s shoulder with a long, frustrated groan, Tyki’s fingers tracing up and down his back even while his shoulders shook with silent laughter. Muffled into Tyki’s shirt, Allen mumbled, “Are we done having sex yet?”

“Hopefully not for good, no,” Tyki answered like a taunt, his laughter sitting in the corners of his voice.

“But for now,” Allen sighed, defeated, unwinding his legs from Tyki’s waist, “yes?”

His smile, when Allen pulled away to see it, was more amused than frustrated. Amused at Allen, rather than the horror of their situation. “I don’t think we’ve much say in the matter, I’m afraid,” he reasoned, and Allen slumped with his hands slipping from Tyki’s hair to rest heavy and defeated on his shoulders. 

“I suppose you’re right,” he huffed, and pushed gently at Tyki to give him room to slip down off the edge of the sink. 

“Are you  _ finished?”  _ Lavi called from outside the door with another barrage of knocks, thoroughly exasperated. 

“I finished a while ago, actually,” Allen admitted slipping past Tyki to pick up his shirt from the floor and pull it over his head. 

_ “God!”  _ Lavi cried, sounding physically ill at the thought, “DON’T.” His glare, when Allen opened the door to him, was so earnestly reprimanding that Allen couldn’t help but burst into laughter at the sight of it. “I  _ live  _ with you,” Lavi stressed while Allen slipped past, followed a moment later by an unabashed Tyki. “There are some things I  _ can’t  _ know, in order to do that comfortably.”

“Alright,” Allen teased with a roll of his eyes, swinging over the back of the couch to lay across the seats, “I won’t tell you  _ anything, ever.” _

“Can you tell me what you touched in here, so I can avoid it?” Lavi complained, stepping into the bathroom.

“Yeah; wash your hands in the kitchen,” Allen warned, and snorted a laugh at Lavi’s resoundingly appalled yell. 

Tyki came to fold his arms across the back of the couch, shoulders pushed into a relaxed slouch while he smiled down at Allen, all heavy and sly. “You left your wine in there,” he reminded, even as the door snapped closed behind Lavi. “Would you like another?”

“I think we’re running out of glasses,” Allen said, grin curling his lips, eyes  _ loving  _ how gorgeous Tyki looked after having Allen’s fingers in his hair, lips on his skin, hands rucking up his shirt and loosening his tie, “but you’re welcome to try your best.”

Quiet, teasing, mocking in a joke almost familiar - because they  _ were  _ familiar now, Allen supposed. They weren’t strangers, at least - Tyki said while he pushed to stand, hand lingering on the back of the couch, smile lingering on his lips, “You deserve, of course, only my best efforts.”

Allen closed his eyes on the quiet laugh that fell on a breath past his lips, and when he opened them narrow and satisfied, they fell not quite accidentally on Tyki’s lovely back - shoulders handsomely broad, rumpled shirt come untucked from his dress pants, and everything still managed to fit him so divine. 

He could sleep like that, Allen realised, cocaine still thrumming through his veins. Were he not so high, were his heart not shuddering like an expectant thrill in his chest, he could fall asleep looking at Tyki, and have the most wonderful dreams he could think of. 

His attention took a long moment to catch on to what was actually happening in the kitchen - where Tyki was, and where Road was. 

But when he realised, he pushed himself up too quickly on his elbow, nerves back to fluttering confusion in his stomach at the vile look on Road’s face. Murderous. She was hissing anger and there was lightning in her fingertips when she pushed sharp at Tyki’s shoulder with the quiet, furious statement of, “You ruined  _ everything.” _

“Oh my god,” Tyki breathed, lips quirking in a conflicted, confused, entirely unamused smile. As though he was trying to decide if there was anything humorous about what was about to happen. “Are you serious?” he asked, and forced an incredulous laugh but didn’t make a move to take back the half-step Road had managed to force out of him. “You’re seriously doing this?”

“You  _ knew  _ I wanted that,” she bit out, face like a thundercloud. Face like a hailstorm. “I  _ told  _ you I did, and you  _ ruined! Everything!”  _ she barked, each word stressed with another sharp shove to Tyki’s chest.

He gave and gave the distance she dragged from him, still seeming too confused - too  _ disbelieving -  _ to want to do much about it. “Do you even  _ know  _ him?” he tried to laugh, hands spread like he refused to fight back, while his words and the icy cut underlining them seemed to say something else altogether. “Had you even  _ met  _ him before tonight?”

“Had  _ you?”  _ Road countered, seething, enraged. 

Panic - or something like it - was cold-curdling in Allen’s stomach. Twisting uncomfortable, like ice shards, or sea glass. 

Indignant, affronted, Tyki defended, “Briefly, yes!”

Sarcastic, mocking, childish, Road threw his words back like a twisted taunt, voice escalating to catch the attention of Jasdero and David, where they were bickering about something uninvolved and unimportant.  _ “Briefly, yes!  _ God,” she snapped, “you’re such an  _ asshole.” _

“Look at yourself,” Tyki gritted, voice pitched low and quiet, and took a step back to meet her. “He’s a fucking  _ human,  _ not a blow-up doll; you can’t  _ dibs  _ someone who can make their own fucking decisions.”

_ “Ohhh,”  _ Road sang, spat, “don’t pretend like you’ve grown a heart, Tyki Mikk. You’re just  _ using  _ him,” she punctuated with another hard push, forcing away the distance Tyki had closed between them, “to make me  _ angry,”  _ she snapped with another, “and I  _ hate  _ you!” she yelled, so childish in her frustration, terrifying in her anger. 

“Yeah,” Tyki said, voice and expression both laced with a sneer, “this may come as a surprise to you, but I don’t fuck people out of  _ spite,  _ just to make you  _ mad.” _

“What,” she scoffed a loose, high laugh, “so you’re gonna wine and dine your new little sex toy?” she demanded. “Gonna use him all up and throw him out when he’s just an empty shell? Oh,  _ Tyki!”  _ she crooned, too happy, too poisonously pleasant, “You ruin people so well!”

Deadly quiet, face cut from stone, body immovable, Tyki commanded, “Stop it.”

Taunting, dark and sarcastic and cutting, Road laughed in that same almost unhinged way, “Whatcha gonna do? Steal Christmas?”

“Why are you being such a  _ brat?”  _ Tyki hissed, voice so quiet Allen wouldn’t have been able to hear it but for the way they were hissed from between his teeth.

“I dunno!” she cried, that mockery of childishness falling away to just leave anger. “Maybe because you never treat me like an  _ adult!” _

Tyki’s laugh was dry, and brittle as thin ice. “Real mature,” he mocked, “making out like this chicken-egg bullshit started with me.”

Road’s embittered, hauntingly frustrated groan tore through the apartment. The door to the bathroom swung open, silent and unnoticed by any of the statues in the room but Allen, but he was so small, so small, so familiar with this scene that he couldn’t he couldn’t he couldn’t look away, couldn’t look at Lavi, couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe couldn’t breathe couldn’t  _ breathe.  _

“Like for  _ ONCE,”  _ Road cried, hysterical, uncertain of if she was going to cry or laugh and unwilling to give herself over to either, “you can’t take responsibility for doing a shitty thing.”

And Tyki - Tyki was smiling bitterly, crumbling plaster on his brickwork face, like he was still trying to find something amusing in it all. He inclined his head and shook it, eyes closed, fingers passing over his brow. “Okay,” he said, voice moulded plastic. Fake, fake, fake and dishonest. Entreating and sarcastic and so so angry beneath the immovable veneer of pleasantry. “Yeah, okay,” he allowed, indulged. Looked up at Road’s fury to say, “Sorry I stole your one and only. But you know what?” he offered, so sweet, so simple. Poison. “You’ll get over it,” he promised, his smile too pretty and honest. “I  _ swear.” _

“I hope you fall in love with him,” was what Road ended up saying, voice as deadly as a crossed line, “and I hope he ends up just like Lulu.”

“Alright,  _ ENOUGH,”  _ Lavi snapped over Tyki’s unresponsive silence, firm and unwavering and so brutally unforgiving, striding into the room with a commanding scowl. 

His sharp voice snapped the way Allen’s bones had been calcified, locked in place with immovable joints. 

“Fucking  _ christ,  _ Road?” David muttered, incredulous, the seal of resounding silence broken.

“I  _ hate  _ you,” she was saying as Allen slipped up from the couch, silent and unobtrusive as a ghost, “and you’re so fucking selfish, and you’ve never  _ once  _ given a SHIT about anyone but yourself.”

Tyki, when Allen peeled open the door of his bedroom, had murmured in a voice so quiet - so subdued and unresponsive, like he’d already signed off on the argument, “I think we should call it a night.”

Road’s cutting laugh fell through Allen’s door like a threat, like if she cried she’d hit Tyki where it hurt. “I am  _ NOT,”  _ she stated, still vicious, “going home with you.”

It was just sound after that - just sound. Tyki’s empty voice murmuring to Jasdero, to David, telling them to take her next door. Allen crawled onto the bed without turning on the light, and wondered why it had to hurt so fucking much all the time.

Wondered why it had to hurt so fucking much, to hear them yell and see them fight and feel the exhaustion that weighed on Tyki’s curled shoulders and dipped head, because anger was a terrible thing, and it always took so so so much more than it gave. 

Because anger was a terrible thing, and it always left nothing but ashes behind.

There was some twisted comfort to be found for Allen, to press his back into the corner of the room and draw his knees up to his chest. To keep his eyes pinned on the sliver of light that fell under the door. 

After a long moment - a long few minutes, after the debris of the tragedy was cleared from the room, shadows passed over that sliver of light and hesitated outside. There was a murmured conversation, and Allen wasn’t sure if he was glad that the walls were thin enough to hear through. 

“He just doesn’t… like fighting much. Doesn’t like Christmas much anyway. It’s been a weird couple of weeks, this is just kinda. I dunno, breaking point? It always is, don’t um. It’s not your  _ fault  _ or anything, it just… happens.”

“I don’t mean to overstay my welcome, or - or make things  _ worse,  _ but. May I - could I go speak to him?”

Allen bit his tongue, bit his cheek, watched the shadows beneath the door and listened to the silence of Lavi’s hesitation.

“I won’t be long,” Tyki reassured, voice a low, respectful murmur. “I just want to be sure he’s alright.”

Lavi’s shadow slipped away, disappeared. Wry and more than a little facetious, he muttered, “He’s  _ always  _ alright.”

Tyki breathed a laugh, understanding, and the doorknob gave its familiar rattle when he twisted it open. 

The light slipped into the room like something liquid. Something silver, and alive. 

“Hey,” Tyki Mikk said as though he didn’t know that Allen knew it was him.

A wavering smile, almost amused, pulled at Allen’s lips in the dark. “Hey,” he said back, and it sounded less mocking than he’d intended.

“Want me to close the door?” he asked, hesitating in the light, and Allen curled his arms over his knees so he could press his lips against them. 

“Yes, please,” he said, less assured than he’d intended.

The latch clicked shut behind him, the light locked out to creep seeking fingers beneath the wood. Allen swallowed back something nervous, and wondered if he knew how to pull his eyes away from it.

Wondered if he trusted it not to slink inside and steal his unwary breath, if he stopped watching it for a moment. 

“I’m sorry,” Tyki said, and took a careful step into the room - uncertain of the dark, Allen supposed. Regardless, it sounded too rote to be honest.

Allen scoffed a laugh. Humourless.

“I’m sorry about Road,” he said, and Allen thought it was probably interesting that he sounded a touch more earnest and  _ far  _ more honest when he was apologising on the behalf of someone who wasn’t there to tell him to shove it up his ass. 

Tyki paused when Allen didn’t say anything.

Amended, after a moment, “I’m sorry we had to fight, and that you had to see it.”

“It’s okay.” It wasn’t quite. Not really.

“It isn’t, really,” Tyki refuted, and took another carefully measured step into the room. “I,” he stopped, paused. Reconsidered. “I should have known better,” he said. “I should have… acted. Better.”

“Like an adult?” Allen tried to tease, lips pressed against his arms, eyes watching the way the slender cut of light caught on Tyki’s watch. 

He huffed a sigh, weary. “I suppose,” he allowed, and propped a hand on his hip in defeat, the light sliding off the glass surface like water. “Yes,” he admitted, “yeah. Like an adult.”

He didn’t say anything more, and Allen let the silence of expectation stretch between them.

“So,” Allen prompted at length, and lifted his chin to rest on his arms.

Tyki’s feet shuffled another half-step, and he asked, “May I sit with you?”

Allen shifted, sat back. Dropped his hands to curl around his ankles. Something fluttered in his chest, churned in his stomach. Uncomfortable. 

In the dark, Allen could almost believe his silhouette to belong to Cross. 

But he didn’t want that.

He didn’t want Cross reassuring him. He didn’t want Cross involved in fights where he didn’t yell back, and he didn’t want Cross asking if he should close the door. Didn’t want him feeling his way through Allen’s dark room because if he turned the light on there’d be no way to tell if someone was standing just outside, listening for the kid he purported to have. 

That wasn’t like him at all - and regardless, Allen didn’t want Cross, and hadn’t for a long, long time.

“Yeah,” he said, and his voice came out a tone more tremulous than he’d intended. 

Because Tyki Mikk wasn’t Cross Marian, and that didn’t mean he  _ cared,  _ but it meant Allen wouldn’t mind seeing what his comfort looked like.

“I don’t know,” Tyki said, feeling carefully for the edge of Allen’s bed before kneeling onto it, the mattress dipping into his weight, “if you’re going to be okay. And I don’t think it’s my  _ business  _ to know,” he added, crawling up so he could come to lean against the wall with Allen. “But I’d like,” he started, stopped, dragged his hands up the top of his thighs, then back down so they rested on his knees. “I’d like,” he said slowly, carefully, “to take you out. Next week, if you like,” he said, and Allen could hear the abashedly amused smile in his voice. “If you’ve got no plans for New Year’s Day.”

Allen’s fingers picked at the sheet beneath him. “Any particular reason,” he said, “why I should?”

Tyki seemed to consider that very carefully, and Allen was glad that he did. 

“I think,” he said at length, “mostly, I would like to clear the air about a few things.”

Allen rested his chin on his wrist, draped over his knees. “You don’t have to explain yourself,” he said. 

“I do,” Tyki insisted, and twisted so he could be facing Allen, his shoulder pressed against the wall. “Let me start this whole thing again,” he said, and Allen had the strong feeling of being watched through the dark. Unwavering, and determined. “I went about this all wrong -  _ all  _ of it. And I’d like to do things the way I should have from the start.”

“That so?” Allen asked, trying desperately to fight down that tickle of wary endearment. 

“Absolutely,” Tyki confirmed, as stern as a mockery of earnestness. “So firstly, I’d like to ask; can I kiss you?”

“Will you?” Allen countered. 

“Not if you don’t want me to,” Tyki reasoned simply. 

Allen let himself think about it for a few long seconds, and decided, “Then yes, you can,” for the same reason he’d taken the offer of cocaine; because he had a choice, and he could say no, and he always seemed to find that left him wanting to say yes.

“Now?” Tyki clarified, and Allen lifted his head a little, tilted his cheek. 

Almost an invitation, but not quite an answer. 

“Yeah,” he said, quiet as a heartbeat, hardly daring to breathe for how gentle Tyki spoke.

Fingertips at his chin, warm and forgiving. Gentle. 

Lips at the corner of his mouth, soft enough to have something tender and sore unwind in his stomach, throat curling tight around what might have been a sob. He closed his eyes, scrunched them tight. Dug his fingers against his knees so no sound would escape him. 

It was childish, in a way. Innocent. A young, coltish kiss that had him feeling fourteen. Feeling fourteen, but this time done right. 

For a terribly brief moment, it was just him - just Allen, and Tyki’s kind lips almost pressed to his in the dark that had always been his only cold comfort. Just him, and none of the sharp blackness that hid all his terror and clung to his skin like a viscous, clammy thing. 

Because he finally - because  _ finally,  _ he knew what it felt like. To just… be…

_ happy. _

Feeling fourteen, and feeling like every moment since he’d been kicked awake in math’s class had happened the way it  _ should  _ have happened, and not the way it  _ did.  _

For a moment, at least.

For as long as that moment lasted.

After that moment - indulgent enough to seem long but quick enough to be chaste - Tyki pulled away, and left a little of that painful, wishful comfort behind.

“Thank you,” was what Tyki said, quiet enough to be honest.

Allen didn’t say anything.

Couldn’t, around the tension winding tighter in his throat, the knot in his stomach wrung so painfully loose. 

“I’m afraid,” he confessed when it became clear Allen couldn’t speak for how twisted up he was, “I’ve made a real mess of things.”

Allen tried to swallow, and managed - barely - to free his voice. “A little,” he admitted, and pressed his cheek against his knees, “but I don’t think it’s entirely your fault.”

“Do you really think that?” he asked, and sounded so skeptical that it tore a short, warbled laugh from Allen’s throat.

“I don't think it was anyone's fault,” he reasoned simply. “No one was  _ really  _ doing the wrong thing, but everyone was sort of doing the wrong thing by someone else.”

“Do you think so?”

“People are complicated,” he shrugged, remembering the conversation he’d had with Lavi while he’d stood with his forehead pressed to the cool glass of the gas station fridge, “so I guess everything else has to be, too.”

“I suppose,” Tyki allowed, and seemed to be considering that quite deeply. “Road and I will make up in the morning,” he said, “when she’s less volatile and I'm more reasonable.”

“Good,” Allen said, and meant it. “I’d hate for something so small to cause a big problem.”

“Small,” Tyki repeated, and seemed to turn the word over. “Is that what you think of yourself?”

“Maybe,” Allen shrugged, and didn’t answer further than that. “Is that what you think of everyone but yourself?” he asked, because if Tyki was going to poke and prod at the blue bruises then Allen felt it was only fair to do the same. 

Tyki’s lips seemed to twist in a wry, unamused sort of smile, and he shuffled to lean his back against the wall, hands hanging between his knees. “Maybe,” he said, and didn’t sound very happy about Allen asking. 

Allen let them simmer in their paired dissatisfaction, each reflecting on things they should probably work to change but more likely wouldn’t bother. At length, he said, “I don’t think you’re a very good person, Tyki Mikk,” and meant  _ I don’t think we’re very good people.  _

“I don’t think so either,” he agreed, and seemed to know exactly what Allen meant. 

Allen seemed to find some kind of familiarity in that. Some kind of consolation. 

He wasn’t a good person, no.  _ They  _ weren’t. But that didn’t necessarily make them bad. 

People were complicated, and it could never be so simple as that. Everyone had their vices. 

“Do you think it’s a good idea?” he asked next, thumbs rolling circles against his own knees. “New Year’s Day,” he clarified, and cut a glance to Tyki’s silhouette from the corner of his eye. 

“I don’t know,” he admitted, and glanced down at Allen. 

The light from beneath the door seemed to catch in his eyes - the slightest pinpricks of silver-gold. Someone waiting behind the door. 

Someone wanting to get in, and to see him cloaked in all his darkness. 

“I think it could be wonderful,” he said, “or it could be terrible. But I don’t think it’ll be anything in between.”

“Are you a gambling man?” Allen asked, and Tyki’s smile was magnificent.

“Will I see you, then?”

“Maybe,” Allen said, amusement curling at his lips. “If you kiss me again.”

Tyki laughed, and didn’t really stop laughing when his grinning lips found Allen’s, fumbling sweet and soft in the dark. “Let me try again,” he said, and pulled away to right his expression and sober his amusement. “Let me,” he murmured, teasing and happy, and his fingers traced like dew-jeweled webs across Allen’s cheek - delicate and beautiful, a whole morning’s light held in each drop. They wove gently through his hair, curled behind his ear like a secret, and Tyki’s lips found Allen’s so effortlessly in the dark that Allen wondered if it was all in his head.

Wondered, as he melted into the warmth of a summer sun, if there was really such thing as night. As darkness.

Wondered what it felt like, to be anything but  _ happy. _

“I should go,” he whispered against Allen’s lips, “I should go. Your rabbit is quite the guard dog,” he murmured, teased, pressed his kiss to the corner of Allen’s mouth, to his cheek. 

“You should go,” Allen breathed, smiled, his fingers resting in the dip of Tyki’s collarbone. “I’d love for you to stay,” he confessed on a laugh, “but you should go.”

“Kicking me out, are you?” Tyki teased, and pulled Allen’s hand from his chest so he could place a kiss to each of his fingers, and then one into the palm of his hand. 

“Maybe I’ll get bored, if you stay the night,” Allen countered, and let his hand drop simply to Tyki’s knee. “You don’t want that, do you?”

“In fact,” Tyki indulged, “that’s the  _ last  _ thing I want.” He slipped a hand beneath Allen’s, and delicately threaded their fingers together.

* * *

 

Tyki Mikk slipped out some minutes later with a smile and a lingering kiss, and Allen’s number saved to his phone. For some reason, beyond where Allen could argue, he flicked the light on with a teasing grin thrown over his shoulder moment before closing the door behind him.

Lavi pushed in not too long after, once there had been another murmured conversation Allen didn’t quite catch and the front door had closed behind Tyki’s gentle departure. 

The Yves Saint Laurent coat, as gorgeous as it was, hung awkward on Lavi’s frame. 

Shoulders too narrow to fill it, arms too short. 

“How do people just  _ wear  _ stuff like this?” he was asking, admiring the way the woolen cuffs reached past his palms. “Like, you’re just wandering around wearing a piece of fabric that costs more than my  _ life.” _

_“Lavi,”_ Allen hissed, lurching to the edge of his bed, “take it _off,_ oh my _god!”_

“Not my fault he left it. What’re we gonna do with it?” he asked, twirling on is heel so the long coat spun out around him. “Pawn it?”

“We’re going to _give it back,”_ Allen snapped, aghast. “Next time he’s around Jasdevie’s.”

“Why don’t we give it to them, then?” Lavi teased, rummaging around in the pockets.

“Because they  _ will  _ pawn it,” Allen reasoned, dry.

“Nutcrackerrrrrrrrrr!” Lavi crowed, waving around the ticket stub he’d found, “and a cigarette case filled wiiiiiith…  _ Ohhhhh!”  _ he sang, delicate, “Ooh la la! This is either coke or weed.”

“How can you tell?” Allen sniffed, so bitterly torn between propriety and just how damn much he wanted to see what Tyki Mikk kept in the pockets of a five-thousand-dollar coat. 

“Blue mark,” Lavi said, holding up a crisp, straight, hand-rolled cigarette, a slim line drawn down the filter in highlighter.

“Well,” Allen reasoned, shifted, “it’s probably weed then, isn’t it?” So far as he knew, people didn’t tend to roll cocaine into joints.

But, well. Clearly he didn’t know much.

Lavi heaved a long, considering humm, turning it this way and that in the light. “I don’t think so,” he said, and at Allen’s scowl he reasoned, “He doesn’t have the look of someone who smokes weed.”

“He brought cocaine to a Christmas party,” Allen reasoned, dubious.

“Yeah, and he’s obviously rich enough to afford it,” he snorted, and gestured to the coat. “But heaps of businessmen are proper cokeheads,” he shrugged, “and never touch weed.”

“That,” Allen frowned, “doesn’t make sense.”

“Takes three weeks to pass a piss test,” Lavi reasoned with another indelicate shrug, and held the cigarette up to the light. “Coke’s out of your system the next day.”

_ “Regardless,”  _ Allen groaned, letting himself fall onto his stomach on the bed and rolling over so he could watch Lavi, head hanging off the edge of the mattress, “we should probably hang that up, and we should probably  _ not  _ smoke his cocaine joints.”

“You are so reasonable,” Lavi sniffed, offended, “for someone who got high with a man you’d just met and had sex in the bathroom on Christmas.”

“Whatever,” Allen groaned, rolling over onto his side, body curling in on itself out of habit. “Just hang it up, and come be my big spoon. We didn’t get a chance to cuddle.”

“Ohhhhh,” Lavi cooed, teasing, while he made for Allen’s dresser, shrugging the coat from his shoulders,  _ “tragic.”  _

But, well. He collapsed onto the bed behind Allen all the same, curled arms around his ribs and crushed the air out of him until Allen was squirming and laughing, kicking out to have Lavi loosen his hold. And for the first time in probably all his life, Allen ended up falling asleep with the light on. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i wish i could re-write the whole blowjob but if i was going to do that then i'd just cut the whole thing out and leave it vague rather than explicit so. yeah.


End file.
